Air
Force Lt. Col. Marc Abshire, 40, a speechwriter for Air Force Secretary
James Roche, was working on several speeches this morning when he felt
the blast of the explosion at the Pentagon. His office is on the D ring,
near the eighth corrider, he said. "It shot me back in my chair.
There was a huge blast. I could feel the air shock wave of it,"
Abshire said. "I didn't know exactly what it was. It didn't rumble.
It was more of a direct smack. I said, 'This isn't right. Something's
wrong here.'" "We all went out in the hallway. People were yelling 'Evacuate!
Evacuate!' And we found ourselves on the lawn and looking back on our
building. It was very much a surrealistic sort of experience. It's just
definitely not right to see smoke coming out of the Pentagon. It was
a very strange sight to see."http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/metro/daily/sep01/attack.html

Anderson
Steve

I
witnessed the jet hit the Pentagon on September 11. From my office on
the 19th floor of the USA TODAY building in Arlington, Va., I have a
view of Arlington Cemetery, Crystal City, the Pentagon, National Airport
and the Potomac River. ... Shortly after watching the second tragedy,
I heard jet engines pass our building, which, being so close to the
airport is very common. But I thought the airport was closed. I figured
it was a plane coming in for landing. A few moments later, as I was
looking down at my desk, the plane caught my eye. It didn't register
at first. I thought to myself that I couldn't believe the pilot was
flying so low. Then it dawned on me what was about to happen. I watched
in horror as the plane flew at treetop level, banked slightly to
the left, drug it's wing along the ground and slammed into the west
wall of the Pentagon exploding into a giant orange fireball. Then
black smoke. Then white smoke. http://www.jmu.edu/alumni/tragedy%5Fresponse/read%5Fmessages.html

Anderson
Ted

Lt.
Col. Ted Anderson : "We ran to the end of our building, turned left
and saw nothing but huge, billowing black smoke, and a brilliant,
brilliant explosion of fire." (...) One of the Pentagon's two fire
trucks was parked only 50 feet from the crash site, and it was "totally
engulfed in flames," Anderson says. Nearby, tanks full of propane
and aviation fuel had begun igniting, and they soon began exploding,
one by one. (...) Back in the building again, Anderson said he began
"screaming and hollering for people as secondary and third-order explosions
started going off. One of them was a fire department car exploding-I
think my right eardrum exploded at the same time, and it unequivocally
scared the heck out of me." http://www.msnbc.com/news/635293.asp

Anlauf
Deb & Jeff

Mrs.
Deb Anlauf, resident of Colfax, Wisconsin, was in her 14th floor of
the Sheraton Hotel [located 1.6 mile from the explosion], (immediately
west of the Navy Annex) when she heard a "loud roar": Suddenly I saw
this plane right outside my window. You felt like you could touch it;
it was that close. It was just incredible. "Then it shot straight across
from where we are and flew right into the Pentagon. It was just this
huge fireball that crashed into the wall (of the Pentagon). When it
hit, the whole hotel shook. (…) Jeff didn't feel the impact of
the plane crash as directly as his wife. He was attending an environmental
meeting on the second floor of the hotel when the plane struck the Pentagon.
About five seconds before the crash, Jeff said he heard the sound of
"tin being dropped," likely as construction workers building an addition
to the hotel saw the plane and dropped their building materials. "Then,
about 5 seconds later, the whole hotel shook," Jeff recalled.
"I could feel it moving. We said 'Oh, my gosh, what's going on?'
"http://www.leadertelegram.com/specialreports/attack/storydetail.asp?ID=7

Gary
Bauer, a former Presidential candidate, happened to be driving into
Washington, D.C. that morning, to a press conference on Capitol Hill."I
was in a massive traffic jam, hadn't moved more than a hundred yards
in twenty minutes. ... I had just passed the closest place the Pentagon
is to the exit on 395 . . . when all of a sudden I heard the roar
of a jet engine.""I looked at the woman sitting in the car next to
me. She had this startled look on her face. We were all thinking the
same thing. We looked out the front of our windows to try to see the
plane, and it wasn't until a few seconds later that we realized the
jet was coming up behind us on that major highway. And it veered to
the right into the Pentagon. The blast literally rocked all of
our cars. It was an incredible moment.massnews.com / Amy Contrada
/ December 2001 http://www.massnews.com/past_issues/2001/dec%202001/1201bauer.htm

Anger
and guilt still sear Lieutenant Colonel Michael Beans who shakes his
head ruefully and asks himself why he survived: "Why you, not them?
Who made that decision?" (…) Inside the Pentagon, the blast lifted
Beans off the floor as he crossed a huge open office toward his
desk. "You heard this huge concussion, then the room filled with
this real bright light, just like everything was encompassed within
this bright light," said Beans. "As soon as I hit the floor, all
the lights went out, there was a small fire starting to burn."
His friends were not so lucky. Not far away on the same floor, Beans'
once familiar world had turned into a terrifying maze as well. Opening
a door to the outer E-ring corridor, Beans saw waves of fire rolling
towards him like surf on a beach. Turning back, he groped slowly back
across the room on hands and knees. The sprinkler came on and that kept
the smoke and heat down. But it was nervewracking and Beans was alone,
listening as the building burned. "It was so quiet," he recalled. "There
was no screaming, nobody saying anything, just nothing." He thought
he might not make it out alive. He thought about his wife, his daughter
and son, his 22 years in the army. "I remember taking a couple of breaths
there, and I made up my mind: I just can't go out this way," he said.
Suddenly out of the smoke a man ran by. "I tried to grab him, and I
tried to yell at him," Beans said. But "he just disappeared into the
smoke." Alone again, Beans crawled with his face to the floor. Then
the carpet turned to wet tile, and he looked up and saw he was in a
corridor. He ran and as the smoke cleared, he saw a guard. Beans discovered
later that his head and forearms were burned. He now wears special flesh-colored
compression sleeves on his arms. "These burns are going to heal, eventually,"
he said. But the memories "will be with me for the rest of my life."http://www.theosuobserver.com/main.cfm/include/smdetail/synid/54846.html

Begala
Paul

Paul
Begala, a Democratic consultant, said he witnessed an explosion near
the Pentagon. "It was a huge fireball, a huge, orange fireball," he
said in an interview on his mobile phone. He said another witness told
him a helicopter exploded. (AP, Washington, 9/12/2001 11:45:33 PMhttp://www.guardian.co.uk/wtccrash/story/0%2C1300%2C550486%2C00.html

Bell
Mickey

Mickey
Bell : The jet came in from the south and banked left as it entered
the building, narrowly missing the Singleton Electric trailer and the
on-site foreman, Mickey Bell. Bell had just left the trailer when he
heard a loud noise. The next thing he recalled was picking himself off
the floor, where he had been thrown by the blast. Bell, who had been
less than 100 feet from the initial impact of the plane, was
nearly struck by one of the planeīs wings as it sped by him. In shock,
he got into his truck, which had been parked in the trailer compound,
and sped away. He wandered around Arlington in his truck and tried to
make wireless phone calls. He ended up back at Singletonīs headquarters
in Gaithersburg two hours later, according to President Singleton, not
remembering much. The full impact of the closeness of the crash wasnīt
realized until coworkers noticed damage to Bellīs work vehicle. He had
plastic and rivets from an airplane imbedded in its sheet metal,
but Bell had no idea what had happened. During Bellīs close call,
other Singleton workers, including sub-foreman Greg Cobaugh, were doing
other work on the first and third floors. The blast wasnīt very loud
to them. They were talking about reports that two planes crashed into
the World Trade Center in Manhattan, New York - not considering the
noise they heard could be a similar attack. http://www.necanet.org/whats_new/report.cfm?ID=1003

Benedetto
Richard

Richard
Benedetto, a USA TODAY reporter, was on his way to work, driving on
the Highway parrallel to the Pentagon : " It was an American
Airlines airplane, I could see it very clearly.(...) I didn't see
the impact. (...) The sound itself sounded more like a thud rather
than a bomb (...) rather than a loud bomb explosion it sounded
muffled, heavy, very deep. I didn't see any flaps, it looked like
the plane was just in normal flying mode but heading straight down.It
was straight. The only thing we saw on the ground outside there
was a piece of a ... the tail of a lamp post. (Video)
high bandwidth : http://digipressetmp3.teaser.fr/uploads/491/Benedetto2.ram
low bandwidth : http://digipressetmp3.teaser.fr/uploads/491/Benedetto.ram

Biggert
Judy

Members
of Congress have been shuttled to the site to inspect the damage. Rep.
Judy Biggert (R-Ill.) made the trip on Thursday. She saw remnants
of the airplane. ''There was a seat from a plane, there was part
of the tail and then there was a part of green metal, I could not tell
what it was, a part of the outside of the plane,'' she said. ''It smelled
like it was still burning.''

Birdwell
Brian

LTC
Brian Birdwell. He was just heading back down the hall to his office
when the building exploded in front of him. The flash fire was immediate
and the smoke was thick. The blast had thrown him down, giving
him a concussion. He wanted to head down the hall toward the A ring...but
because he couldn't see anything he had no idea which way to go and
he didn't want to head in the wrong direction. (...) Once they stabilized
Brian, they transferred him to George Washington Hospital where...the
best, cutting edge burn doctor in the U.S. The doctor told him that
had he not gone to Georgetown first, he probably would not have survived
because of the jet fuel in his lungs.http://www.aog.usma.edu/Class/1961/BirdwellLuncheon.htm

Birdwell
Brian

Down
the hall from Yates, Lt. Col. Brian Birdwell, 40, had been at his desk
in Room 2E486 since 6:30 a.m. (...) Birdwell walked out to the men's
room in corridor 4, a move that saved his life. He had just taken three
or four steps out of the bathroom when the building was rocked. "Bomb!"
the Gulf War vet immediately thought as he was knocked down. When he
stood up, he realized he was on fire. "Jesus, I'm coming to see you"
http://www.hjpa.org/morenews.html

Boger
Sean

Sean
Boger, Air Traffic Controller and Pentagon tower chief - "I just looked
up and I saw the big nose and the wings of the aircraft coming right
at us and I just watched it hit the building." "It exploded. I fell
to the ground and covered my head. I could actually hear the metal
going through the building." The crew, Boger and Spc. Jacqueline
Kidd, air traffic controller and training supervisor, prepared for President
George W. Bush to arrive from Florida around 12:30 p.m.http://www.dcmilitary.com/army/pentagram/6_46/local_news/12049-1.html

Bouchoux
Donald R.

Donald
R. Bouchoux, 53, a retired Naval officer, a Great Falls resident, a
Vietnam veteran and former commanding officer of a Navy fighter squadron,
was driving west from Tysons Corner to the Pentagon for a 10am meeting.
He wrote: At 9:40 a.m. I was driving down Washington Boulevard (Route
27) along the side of the Pentagon when the aircraft crossed about 200
yards [should be more than 150 yards from the impact] in front
of me and impacted the side of the building. There was an enormous
fireball, followed about two seconds later by debris raining down. The
car moved about a foot to the right when the shock wave hit. I had what
must have been an emergency oxygen bottle from the airplane go flying
down across the front of my Explorer and then a second piece of jagged
metal come down on the right side of the car. Washington Post, Sept.
20, 2001
http://web.lexis-nexis.com...

Bowman
John

John
Bowman, a retired Marine lieutenant colonel and a contractor, was in
his office in Corridor Two near the main entrance to the south parking
lot. "Everything was calm,' Bowman said. "Most people knew it was
a bomb. Everyone evacuated smartly. We have a good sprinkling of
military people who have been shot at." http://www.dcmilitary.com/army/pentagram/6_37/local_news/10380-1.html

Braman
Chris

Staff
Sgt. Chris Braman : The lawn was littered with twisted pieces of
aluminum. He saw one chunk painted with the letter ``A,'' another
with a ``C.'' It didn't occur to Braman what the letters signified until
a man in the crowd stooped to pick up one of the smaller metal shards.
He examined it for a moment, then announced: ``This was a jet.''

Bright
Mark

Defense
Protective Service officers were the first on the scene of the terrorist
attack. One, Mark Bright, actually saw the plane hit the building. He
had been manning the guard booth at the Mall Entrance to the building.
"I saw the plane at the Navy Annex area," he said. "I knew it was going
to strike the building because it was very, very low -- at the height
of the street lights. It knocked a couple down." The plane would have
been seconds from impact -- the annex is only a few hundred yards from
the Pentagon. He said he heard the plane "power-up" just before it
struck the Pentagon. "As soon as it struck the building I just called
in an attack, because I knew it couldn't be accidental," Bright said.
He jumped into his police cruiser and headed to the area. http://www.dcmilitary.com/marines/hendersonhall/6_39/local_news/10797-1.html

Brown
Ervin

At
the Pentagon, employees had heard about or seen footage of the World
Trade Centre attack when they felt their own building shake. Ervin Brown,
who works at the Pentagon, said he saw pieces of what appeared to be
small aircraft on the ground, and the part of the building by the heliport
had collapsed.

Brown
Rich

Pentagon
staff raced along a wooden pathway opposite the Pentagon building, all
heading towards bridges that would take them across the Potomac River.
Grown men ran at full pace. Rich Brown was sitting at his desk and "there
was just a huge sound that shook the building for a second or two".
"I don't know what's happened. I assume it's a co-ordinated terrorist
attack." http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2002/08/23/1030052968648.html

Burgess
Lisa

Lisa
Burgess, a reporter for the Army newspaper Stars and Stripes, said she
was walking in a corridor near the blast site and was thrown to the
ground by the force of the blast.
http://www.neurosis.org...

Burgess
Lisa

Lisa
Burgess : Stars and Stripes reporter Lisa Burgess was walking on the
Pentagon's innermost corridor, across the courtyard, when the incident
happened. "I heard two loud booms - one large, one smaller, and the
shock wave threw me against the wall," she said.Burgess, reporting
by telephone from the scene at about 4 p.m., said that five hours
after the blast, still no one was able to get into the building.
After the first casualties were removed, no one was brought out of the
building, either dead or alive.http://www.pstripes.com/01/sep01/ed091201i.html

Campo

It
was a passenger plane. I think an American Airways plane, Mr Campo said.
"I was cutting the grass and it came in screaming over my head. I felt
the impact. The whole ground shook and the whole area was full
of fire. I could never imagine I would see anything like that here."
http://www.guardian.co.uk/wtccrash/story/0%2C1300%2C550486%2C00.html

Cissell
James R.

As
former Cincinnatian James R. Cissell sat in traffic on a Virginia interstate
by the Pentagon Tuesday morning, he saw the blur of a commercial jet
and wondered why it was flying so low. ''Right about the time it was
crossing over the highway, it kind of dawned on me what was happening,''
said Cissell, son of Hamilton County Clerk of Courts Jim Cissell. In
the next blink of an eye, he realized he had a front-row seat to history,
as the plane plowed into the Pentagon, sending a fireball exploding
into the air and scattering debris - including a tire rim suspected
of belonging to the airplane - past his car. (…) In the next seconds
dozens of things flashed through his mind. ''I thought, 'This isn't
really happening. That is a big plane.' Then I saw the faces of some
of the passengers on board,'' Cissell said. While he remembers seeing
the crash, Cissell remembers none of the sounds. ''It came in in a perfectly
straight line,'' he said. ''It didn't slow down. I want to say it accelerated.
It just shot straight in.''http://www.cincypost.com/attack/cissel091201.html

Cleveland
Allen

Allen
Cleveland of Woodbridge Virginia looked out from a Metro train going
to National Airport, to see a jet heading down toward the Pentagon.
"I thought, 'There's no landing strip on that side of the subway tracks,'
" Before he could process that thought, he saw "a huge mushroom cloud.
A lady staThe lady next to me was in absolute hysterics."" . . a silver
pasenger jet, mid sized"http://mfile.akamai.com/920/rm/thepost.download.akamai.com/920/nation/091101-5s.ram

Cleveland
Allen

Soon after the crash(Within 30 seconds of the crash) I witnessed
a military cargo plane(Possibly a C130) fly over the crash site and
circle the mushroom cloud. My brother inlaw also witnessed the same
plane following the jet while he was on the HOV lanes in Springfield.
He said that he saw a jetliner flying low over the tree tops near Seminary
RD in Springfield, VA. and soon afterwards a military plane was seen
flying right behind it. I think this was also a reason for the false
threat of another plane about to crash which caused rescuers
to have to evacuate for a short time after the initial crash. I have
done my research onthis and according to time magazine it took 24 minutes
before Norad was supposedly notified about this particuliar jet and
fighters were scrambling to intercept at that time. Isn't it odd how
there is Not a single mention of this aircraft in ANY of the articles
written about this crash? Also if you had not noticed... There is not
a single picture or live footage of the actual jet prior to its crash
at the Pentagon. Nor is there any of the one that crashed in Pennsylvania.
But if Anyone who rides the metro-rail knows, there are plenty of Video
cameras all around National airport at the parking Garages and the high
level security buildings found all around Crystal city. (3 of which
I have personally found pointed directly towards crystal city which
would have given a great line of site shot of that jet prior to the
crash as well as any other plane which might have been following it.
I personally believe that the government new full well that this was
about to happen and they are hiding something a lot bigger than they
are willing to let out. I was interviewed at Washingtonpost.com and
gave them my full story, but they did not print it as I have told you.
I also find it interesting that one of the planes engines in the pennsylvania
crash was supposedly found 5 miles prior to the crash site(This information
I'm unsure of). The only thing that I'm aware of that might cause that
would be a heat seeking missle. A weapon which I am pretty familiar
with form Ord.training. I'm not saying that the government new exactly
what was about to happen, but I do believe that they are definitely
hiding something here. Many of my friends in intelligence have said
the same. I work in a Gov. building in DC., but my heart is right there
with you and your team. I hope you and those who served with you are
doing well. Take care. http://www.spooky8.com/reviews.htm

Cook
Scott P.

"It was a 757 out of Dulles, which had come up the river in back of
our building, turned sharply over the Capitol, ran past the White House
and the Washington Monument, up the river to Rosslyn, then dropped to
treetop level and ran down Washington Boulevard to the Pentagon (...)
As we watched the black plume gather strength, less than a minute after
the explosion, we saw an odd sight that no one else has yet commented
on. Directly in back of the plume, which would place it almost due west
from our office, a four-engine propeller plane, which Ray later said
resembled a C-130, started a steep decent towards the Pentagon.
It was coming from an odd direction (planes don’t go east-west in the
area), and it was descending at a much steeper angle than most aircraft.
Trailing a thin, diffuse black trail from its engines, the plane reached
the Pentagon at a low altitude and made a sharp left turn, passing just
north of the plume, and headed straight for the White House. All the
while, I was sort of talking at it: "Who the hell are you? Where are
you going? You’re not headed for downtown!" Ray and Verle watched it
with me, and I was convinced it was another attack. But right over the
tidal basin, at an altitude of less than 1000 feet, it made another
sharp left turn to the north and climbed rapidly. Soon it was gone,
leaving only the thin black trail. http://www.clothmonkey.com/91101.htm

Corley

"It
was striking to me how little of the building was involved in the
fire," said Dr. Corley, who has reviewed the Pentagon report. The
fire, he said, "didn't spread and and trap other people in the building."While
125 Pentagon workers and 59 passengers and crew members on the plane
died, few if any of the workers who died were from outside the immediate
impact zone.http://www.nytimes.com/2002/11/05/nyregion/05TOWE.html

Correa
Victor

LTC
Victor Correa work at the Pentagon. (…) LTC Victor Correa's office,
what was the Army's Deputy Chief of Staff for Personnel, now the Army
G-1, was in the path of the Boeing 757 that crashed into the Pentagon
on a sunny fall morning. He was walking over to talk to a co-worker
in the next cubicle when he was knocked down by the impact. "I
saw a fireball come over my head," said Correa, an Active Guard
Reservist now assigned to Joint Chiefs of Staff, J-5. "The fireball
was coming like a wind-cloud of smoke trailing it. I also noticed
to my right the windows going out and coming back in. The
fireball came in and out quick - the speed of lightning. As it went
back, it left a cloud of smoke and started dropping. At that time the
fire system went up." Being knocked down turned out to be a life-saver.
(…) "We thought it was some kind of explosion. That somehow someone
got in here and planted bombs because we saw these holes."http://www.army.mil/usar/news/2002/09-11anniv/herotellsall.html

Creed
Dan

He
and two colleagues from Oracle software were stopped in a car near the
Naval Annex, next to the Pentagon, when they saw the plane dive down
and level off. "It was no more than 30 feet off the ground, and
it was screaming. It was just screaming. It was nothing more than a
guided missile at that point," Creed said. "I can still see the plane.
I can still see it right now. It's just the most frightening thing in
the world, going full speed, going full throttle, its wheels
up," Creed recalls.http://www.ahwatukee.com/afn/community/articles/020906a.html

Near
the Lincoln Memorial, Dave heard two booms, which sounded like
the artillery salutes on the Mall on the Fourth of July, he said. It
was likely the noise from a secondary blast at the Pentagon - http://www.gridlockmag.com/911/

Day
Wayne T.

For one
employee with Wedge One's mechanical subcontractor John J. Kirlin
Inc., Rockville MD, "lucky" is an understatement. "We had one guy
who was standing, looking out the window and saw the plane when it
was coming in. He was in front of one of the blast-resistant windows,"
says Kirlin President Wayne T. Day, who believes the window structure
saved the man's life. According to Matt Hahr, Kirlin's senior project
manager at the Pentagon, the employee "was thrown about 80 ft down
the hall through the air. As he was traveling through the air,
he says the ceiling was coming down from the concussion. He got thrown
into a closet, the door slammed shut and the fireball went past him,"
recounts Hahr. "Jet fuel was on him and it irritated his eyes,
but he didn't get burned. Then the fireball blew over and the
sprinklers came on, and he was able to crawl out of the closet and
get out of the building through the courtyard."http://www.designbuildmag.com/oct2001/pentagon1001.asp

DeChiaro
Steve

Instead
of following the streams of people away from the Pentagon, Steve DeChiaro
ran toward the smoke. As he reached the west side of the building he
saw a light post bent in half. "But when I looked at the site, my
brain could not resolve the fact that it was a plane because it only
seemed like a small hole in the building," he said. "No tail.
No wings. No nothing." He followed the emergency crews that had
just arrived. He saw people hanging out of windows and others crawling
from the demolished area. "These people were covered in what I thought
was powder - I don't know anything about medicine or first aid, I'm
an engineer - but it looked like powder," DeChiaro said. "Only later
did I find out that it was their skin." Civilians and soldiers joined
emergency crews who were rushing inside to pull out anyone they could.
But shortly after 10 a.m. police yelled at people to get back. "Just
as we're about to open the door, they start screaming, 'There's another
inbound plane', " DeChiaro said. "At that moment, your thoughts are:
'I go in the building, I get killed, then I'm no help to anybody.' In
hindsight, I think we should have gone back in that building." For nearly
15 minutes, they stood watching the Pentagon burn and periodically checked
the sky for another plane. That plane never reached Washington but fell,
instead, in rural Pennsylvania. Teams of two and three eventually were
sent back in to find more victims. But as the day grew longer, the flow
of the injured stopped.http://www.gomemphis.com/mca/america_at_war/article/0,1426,MCA_945_1300676,00.html

Defina

"The
only way you could tell that an aircraft was inside was that we saw
pieces of the nose gear. The devastation was horrific. It was obvious
that some of the victims we found had no time to react. The distance
the firefighters had to travel down corridors to reach the fires was
a problem. With only a good 25 minutes of air in their SCBA bottles,
to save air they left off their face pieces as they walked and took
in a lot of smoke," Captain Defina said. Captain Defina was the shift
commander [of an aircraft rescue firefighters crew.]http://www.nfpa.org/NFPAJournal/OnlineExclusive/Exclusive_11_01_01/exclusive_11.01.01.asp

DiPaula
Michael

Michael
DiPaula 41, project coordinator Pentagon Renovation Team - He left a
meeting in the Pentagon just minutes before the crash, looking for an
electrician who didn't show, in a construction trailer less than 75
feet away. "Suddenly, an airplane roared into view, nearly shearing
the roof off the trailer before slamming into the E ring. 'It sounded
like a missile,' DiPaula recalls . . . Buried in debris and covered
with airplane fuel, he was briefly listed by authorities as missing,
but eventually crawled from the flaming debris and the shroud of black
smoke unscathed.http://www.sunspot.net/search/bal-archive-1990.htmlstory
(killtown)

Dobbs
Mike

Marine Corps officer Mike Dobbs was standing on one of the upper levels
of the outer ring of the Pentagon looking out the window when he saw
an American Airlines 737 twin-engine airliner strike the building.
"It seemed to be almost coming in slow motion," he said later Tuesday.
"I didn't actually feel it hit, but I saw it and then we all started
running. They evacuated everybody around us." http://www.abqtrib.com/archives/news01/091201_news_dcscene.shtml

Dobbs
Mike

"...
we saw a plane coming toward us, for about 10 seconds ... It was like
watching a train wreck. I was mesmerized. ... At first I thought it
was trying to crash land, but it was coming in so deliberately, so level...
Everyone said there was a deafening explosion, but with the adrenaline,
we didn't hear it."St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Sept. 13, 2001 - Philip
Dine
http://web.lexisnexis.com ...http://www2.hawaii.edu/~julianr/lexisnexis/dobbs.txt

Steve
Eiden, a truck driver, had picked up his cargo that Tuesday morning
in Williamsburg, Va., and was en route to New York City and witnessed
the aftermath. He took the Highway 95 loop in the area of the Pentagon
and thought it odd to see a plane in restricted airspace, thinking to
himself it was odd that it was flying so low. "You could almost see
the people in the windows," he said as he watched the plane disappear
behind a line of trees, followed by a tall plume of black smoke.
Then he saw the Pentagon on fire, and an announcement came over the
radio that the Pentagon had been hit. http://www.baxterbulletin.com/ads/chronology2001/page2.html

Elgas
Penny

Traffic
was at a standstill. I heard a rumble, looked out my driver's side window
and realized that I was looking at the nose of an airplane coming straight
at us from over the road (Columbia Pike) that runs perpendicular to
the road I was on. The plane just appeared there- very low in the air,
to the side of (and not much above) the CITGO gas station that I never
knew was there. My first thought was "Oh My God, this must be World
War III!" In that split second, my brain flooded with adrenaline
and I watched everything play out in ultra slow motion, I saw
the plane coming in slow motion toward my car and then it banked in
the slightest turn in front of me, toward the heliport. In the nano-second
that the plane was directly over the cars in front of my car, the plane
seemed to be not more than 80 feet off the ground and about 4-5 car
lengths in front of me. It was far enough in front of me that I saw
the end of the wing closest to me and the underside of the other wing
as that other wing rocked slightly toward the ground. I remember recognizing
it as an American Airlines plane -- I could see the windows and the
color stripes. And I remember thinking that it was just like planes
in which I had flown many times but at that point it never occurred
to me that this might be a plane with passengers. In my adrenaline-filled
state of mind, I was overcome by my visual senses. The day had started
out beautiful and sunny and I had driven to work with my car's sunroof
open. I believe that I may have also had one or more car windows open
because the traffic wasn't moving anyway. At the second that I saw the
plane, my visual senses took over completely and I did not hear or
feel anything -- not the roar of the plane, or wind force, or impact
sounds. The plane seemed to be floating as if it were a paper glider
and I watched in horror as it gently rocked and slowly glided straight
into the Pentagon. At the point where the fuselage hit the wall, it
seemed to simply melt into the building. I saw a smoke ring surround
the fuselage as it made contact with the wall. It appeared as a smoke
ring that encircled the fuselage at the point of contact and it seemed
to be several feet thick. I later realized that it was probably the
rubble of churning bits of the plane and concrete. The churning smoke
ring started at the top of the fuselage and simultaneously wrapped down
both the right and left sides of the fuselage to the underside, where
the coiling rings crossed over each other and then coiled back up to
the top. Then it started over again -- only this next time, I also saw
fire, glowing fire in the smoke ring. At that point, the wings disappeared
into the Pentagon. And then I saw an explosion and watched the tail
of the plane slip into the building. It was here that I closed my
eyes for a moment and when I looked back, the entire area was awash
in thick black smoke. http://americanhistory.si.edu/september11/collection/supporting.asp?ID=30

Elliott
Bruce

Former
ammunition plant official evacuated building moments before suicide
airliner collision.Col. Bruce Elliott, former commander of the Iowa
Army Ammunition Plant who was reassigned to the Pentagon in July, watched
in horror Tuesday as a hijacked 757 airliner crashed into the nerve
center of the U.S. military command. Elliott, in a phone interview Wednesday,
said he had just left the Pentagon and was about to board a shuttle
van in a south parking lot when he saw the plane approach and slam into
the west side of the structure. "I looked to my left and saw the plane
coming in," said Elliott, who watched it for several seconds. "It was
banking and garnering speed. I felt it was headed for the Pentagon."
(...) "It was like a kamikaze pilot. I felt it was going to ram the
Pentagon," he said. He said the craft clipped a utility pole guide wire,
which may have slowed it down a bit before it crashed into the building
and burst into flames. (...) Elliott said the rubble was still smoldering
Wednesday morning. http://www.thehawkeye.com/features/911/IdxThur.html

Evey
Walker Lee

The plane
approached the Pentagon about six feet off the ground, clipping
a light pole, a car antenna, a construction trailer and an emergency
generator before slicing into the building, said Lee Evey, the
manager of the Pentagon's ongoing billion-dollar renovation. The plane
penetrated three of the Pentagon's five rings, but was probably stopped
from going farther by hundreds of concrete columns. The plane peeled
back as it entered, leaving pieces of the front of the plane near
the outside of the building and pieces from the rear of the aircraft
farther inside, Evey said. The floors just above the impact remained
intact for about 35 minutes after the crash, allowing many people
in those offices to escape, Evey saidhttp://detnews.com/2001/nation/0110/06/nation-312016.htm

Evey
Walker Lee

Internally,
the Wedge One project included: complete demolition of existing facilities;
significant abatement of hazardous materials (most notably, 28 million
lbs. of asbestos-contaminated material was removed); installation
of all new electrical, mechanical, plumbing and telecommunication
systems within the existing floorplan; structural steel reinforcement;
and replacement of all 1,282 windows in the section, including 386
blast-resistant units on the outermost "E Ring" and innermost "A Ring"
of the building. All-new office space was created with an open space
plan aimed at enhancing flexibility (...) Amazingly, the plane pushed
through the outermost "E Ring", and drove deep into the interior,
its nose coming to rest just inside the "C Ring." http://www.designbuildmag.com/oct2001/pentagon1001.asp

Evey
Walker Lee

We've
learned -- this is wedge one, okay, the newly-renovated area. The
path of the airplane seems to have taken it along this route, so it
entered the building slightly, on this photo, slightly to the left
of what we call corridor four. There are 10 radial corridors in the
building that extend from A ring out through E ring, and this is the
fourth of those radial corridors. So it impacted the building in an
area that had been renovated, but its path was at a -- it appears
to be at a diagonal, so that it entered in wedge one but passed through
into areas of wedge two, an unrenovated portion of the building. And,
of course, you all know it's got rings A through E, five stories tall,
et cetera. QUESTION: That seems to indicate that it came to rest in
ring C, the nose cone. EVEY: Let me talk to that, because you've asked
a number of questions already about the extent of penetration, et
cetera. This is an overhead of the building. The point of penetration
was right here, and we blocked that out to show that's the area of
collapse. The plane actually penetrated through the E ring, C ring
-- excuse me -- E ring, D ring, C ring. This area right here is what
we call A-E Drive. And unlike other rings in the building, it's actually
a driveway that circles the building inside, between the B and the
C ring. The nose of the plane just barely broke through the inside
of the C ring, so it was extending into A-E Drive a little bit. So
that's the extent of penetration of the aircraft. The rings are E,
D, C, B and A. Between B and C is a driveway that goes around the
Pentagon. It's called A-E Drive. The airplane traveled in a path about
like this, and the nose of the aircraft broke through this innermost
wall of C ring into A-E Drive. QUESTION: One thing that's confusing
-- if it came in the way you described, at an angle, why then are
not the wings outside? I mean, the wings would have shorn off. The
tail would have shorn off. And yet there's apparently no evidence
of the aircraft outside the E ring. EVEY: Actually, there's considerable
evidence of the aircraft outside the E ring. It's just not very visible.
When you get up close -- actually, one of my people happened to be
walking on this sidewalk and was right about here as the aircraft
approached. It came in. It clipped a couple of light poles on the
way in. He happened to hear this terrible noise behind him, looked
back, and he actually -- he's a Vietnam veteran -- jumped prone onto
the ground so the aircraft would not actually -- he thinks it (would
have) hit him; it was that low. On its way in, the wing clipped. Our
guess is an engine clipped a generator. We had an emergency temporary
generator to provide life-safety emergency electrical power, should
the power go off in the building. The wing actually clipped that generator,
and portions of it broke off. There are other parts of the plane
that are scattered about outside the building. None of those parts
are very large, however. You don't see big pieces of the airplane
sitting there extending up into the air. But there are many small
pieces. And the few larger pieces there look like they are veins
out of the aircraft engine. They're circular. QUESTION: Would you
say that the plane, since it had a lot of fuel on it at the impact,
and the fact that there are very small pieces, virtually exploded
in flames when it tore into the building? I mean, since there are
not large pieces of the wings laying outside, did it virtually explode?
EVEY: I didn't see it. My people who did see it enter the building
describe it as entering the building and then there being flames
coming out immediately afterwards. Whether you describe it as
an explosion or not, people I talk to who were there, some called
it an explosion. Others called it a large fire. I'm not sure. I wasn't
there, sir. It's just a guess on my part. http://www.patriotresource.com/wtc/federal/0915/DoD.html

Evey
Walker Lee

Walker
Lee Evey, program manager of the Pentagon restoration project : The
fire was so hot, Evey said, that it turned window glass to liquid
and sent it spilling down walls into puddles on the ground. The
impact cracked massive concrete columns far beyond the impact site,
destabilizing a broader section of the building than contractors had
originally thought. http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2002/03/07/attack/main503257.shtml

On Sept.
11, Flight 77 sliced through the outermost three of the Pentagon's
five concentric rings. Fires from the plane's 20,000 gallons of fuel
melted windows into pools of liquid glass. The impact of the
crash fractured concrete pillars well beyond the incisions in the
three outer rings.http://www.grandforks.com/mld/grandforks/2821782.htm

Faram
Mark

I
hate to disappoint anyone, but here is the story behind the photograph.
At the time, I was a senior writer with Navy Times newspaper. It is
an independent weekly that is owned by the Gannett Corporation (same
owners as USA Today). I was at the Navy Annex, up the hill from the
Pentagon when I heard the explosion. I always keep a digital camera
in my backpack briefcase just as a matter of habit. When the explosion
happened I ran down the hill to the site and arrived there approximately
10 minutes after the explosion. I saw the piece, that was near the heliport
pad and had to work around to get a shot if it with the building in
the background. Because the situation was still fluid, I was able to
get in close and make that image within fifteen minutes of the explosion
because security had yet to shut off the area. I photographed it twice,
with the newly arrived fire trucks pouring water into the building in
the background. The collapse of the building above area happened long
after I left the scene. I was not even aware that that had happened
until that evening when I watched the news. My photos were on the wire
by noon. That was the only piece of wreckage of any SIZE that I saw,
but was by no means the ONLY piece. Right after photographing that piece
of wreckage, I also photographed a triage area where medical personnel
were tending to a seriously burned man. A priest knelt in the middle
of the area and started to pray. I took that image and left immediately.
As I stepped onto the highway next to the triage area, I knelt down
to tie my shoe and all over the highway were small pieces of aircraft
skin, none bigger than a half-dollar. Anyone familiar with aircraft
has seen the greenish primer paint that covers many interior metal surfaces
- that is what these shards were covered with. I was out of the immediate
area photographing other things within 20 minutes of the crash.
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/frameup/message/1254

Flyler
Kim

Kim
Flyler was trying to sneak into a parking space near to the building
when she saw the plane: "At that moment I heard a plane and then a loud
cracking noise.... Right before the plane hit the building, you could
see the silhouettes of people in the back two rows. You couldn't
see if they were male or female, but you could tell there was a human
being in there."
The Observer, Sept. 8, 2002

"Traffic
was at a standstill, so I parked on the shoulder, not far from the scene
and ran to the site. Next to me was a cab from D.C., its windshield
smashed out by pieces of lampposts. There were pieces of the
plane all over the highway, pieces of wing, I think. (...) "There
were a lot of people with severe burns, severe contusions, severe lacerations,
in shock and emotional distress"http://www.msnbc.com/news/635293.asp

Fowler
Charles

Navy
Capt. Charles Fowler : Navy Capt. Charles Fowler, assigned to the Joint
Chiefs, was working on a speech for Gen. Henry Shelton, the chairman
of the Joint Chiefs, when he heard the explosion. "You could feel
the building shake," said Fowler. You knew it was a major explosion.
I grabbed all my gear and grabbed the laptop and headed out." "The interesting
part was we didn't hear the alarm go off, but word got around very fast.
It was an orderly evacuation" Fowler's office, on the river side,
appeared to be on the opposite side from the explosion, he said.
"Tons of smoke was coming up from the wedge-lots of black and gray smoke."http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/metro/daily/sep01/attack.html

Fraunfelter
Dan

Dan
Fraunfelter : After the meeting, just before 9:30 a.m., the young engineer
grabbed a subcontractor to help him repair a damaged ceiling grid on
the third floor of the Pentagon's E-Ring. The two were in the middle
of the job when a strange sound ripped through the room. It lasted just
a split second, says Fraunfelter, "A strange sucking, whirring sound,
like a loud vacuum cleaner." Then the sound stopped, the building
shook violently, and the lights went out. http://www.msnbc.com/news/635293.asp

Gilah
Goldsmith, personnel attorney at the Pentagon. When she got to her office
sometime around 9, she phoned her daughter and heard "an incredible
whomp noise." It didn't seem so unusual since her office is situated
near a narrow area where trucks sometimes come by and hit the wall.
Goldsmith was told to evacuate. "We saw a huge black cloud of smoke,"
she said, saying it smelled like cordite, or gun smoke.http://www.jewishsf.com/bk010921/usp14a.shtml

Hagos
Afework

Afework
Hagos, a computer programmer, was on his way to work but stuck in a
traffic jam near the Pentagon when the plane flew over. "There was a
huge screaming noise and I got out of the car as the plane came over.
Everybody was running away in different directions. It was tilting
its wings up and down like it was trying to balance. It hit some
lampposts on the way in." http://www.guardian.co.uk/wtccrash/story/0%2C1300%2C550486%2C00.html

Hagos
Asework

Asework
Hagos, 26, of Arlington, was driving on Columbia Pike on his way to
work as a consultant for Nextel. He saw a plane flying very low and
close to nearby buildings. "I thought something was coming down on me.
I know this plane is going to crash. I've never seen a plane like this
so low." He said he looked at it and saw American Airline insignia and
when it made impact with the Pentagon initially he saw smoke, then flames.

Harrington
Joe

Harrington
was working on the installation of new furniture in Wedge One, when
he was called out to the parking lot to talk about security with his
customer moments before the crash. "About two minutes later one of my
guys pointed to an American Airlines airplane 20 feet high over Washington
Blvd.," Harrington said. "It seemed like it made impact just before
the wedge. It was like a Hollywood movie or something. http://www.dcmilitary.com/army/pentagram/6_37/local_news/10380-1.html

Haubold
Art

At
about 9:20 a.m., Lt. Col. Art Haubold, a public affairs officer with
air force, was in his office on the opposite side of the complex when
the plane struck. "We were sitting there watching the reports on the
World Trade Center. All of a sudden, the windows blew in," he
said. "We could see a fireball out our window."http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/metro/daily/sep01/attack.html

Hemphill
Albert

From
the view of the Navy Annex : After a few moments, Lt Gen Ron Kadish,
Director of the Ballistic Missile Defense Organization entered the Secure
Conference Room to pursue the day's activities and do real work. This
office, with two nice windows and a great view of the monuments, the
Capitol and the Pentagon was "good digs" by any Pentagon standard. I
walked in the office and stood peering out of the window looking at
the Pentagon.As I stood there, I instinctively ducked at the extremely
loud roar and whine of a jet engine spooling up. Immediately, the large
silver cylinder of an aircraft appeared in my window, coming over my
right shoulder as I faced the Westside of the Pentagon directly towards
the heliport. The aircraft, looking to be either a 757 or Airbus, seemed
to come directly over the annex, as if it had been following Columbia
Pike - an Arlington road leading to Pentagon. The aircraft was moving
fast, at what I could only be estimate as between 250 to 300 knots.
All in all, I probably only had the aircraft in my field of view for
approximately 3 seconds. The aircraft was at a sharp downward angle
of attack, on a direct course for the Pentagon. It was "clean",
in as much as, there were no flaps applied and no apparent landing
gear deployed. He was slightly left wing down as he appeared in
my line of sight, as if he'd just "jinked" to avoid something. As he
crossed Route 110 he appeared to level his wings, making a slight
right wing slow adjustment as he impacted low on the Westside of the
building to the right of the helo, tower and fire vehicle around corridor
5. What instantly followed was a large yellow fireball accompanied
by an extremely bass sounding, deep thunderous boom. The yellow fireball
rose quickly as black smoke engulfed the entire Westside of the
Pentagon, obscuring the whole of the heliport. I could feel the concussion
and felt the shockwave of the blast impact the window of the Annex,
knocking me against the desk. http://lists.travellercentral.com/pipermail/tml/2001-September/013153.htmlhttp://www.ournetfamily.com/WarOnTerror/emails/pentagonwitness.shtml

Henson
Jerry

Pinned
in his chair and wrapped in a shroud of thick smoke and darkness, Jerry
Henson had almost given up hope. He could feel all his limbs, but they
wouldn't move. It was as if he were frozen at his desk by forces he
couldn't battle. Through the smoke, he mustered some pleas for help.
His mind still raced to figure out what happened and whether this was
real. It was 9:40 a.m., Sept. 11. (…) airliner (…) slammed into the
Pentagon. "The impact was quite clear," Henson said. "But
it wasn't what you would think. It was just a loud kathump. Just a loud
noise." Then all his senses failed him. The plane had sliced through
the emergency lighting generators leaving everything in blackness. Books
and computer monitors tumbled from the shelves behind him. Then his
head throbbed. Pain shot through his legs. He couldn't move. All he
could taste was smoke and dust. "I knew I was wounded some place because
you can tell the difference between water and blood," he said. "Blood
is sticky and tacky and warm. But I couldn't tell where the blood was
coming from." For 15 minutes he and two of his staff who also were trapped
in the office yelled for help. They yelled for Punches, Henson's deputy.
They yelled for other survivors. They yelled for anyone at all. http://www.gomemphis.com/mca/america_at_war/article/0,1426,MCA_945_1300676,00.html

Henson
Jerry

Inside
the hell that was once his office, Jerry Henson freed his hands enough
to move rubble off of his shoulders. He dislodged his head. But he couldn't
move the heavy desktop from his lap. It had been 15, maybe 20 minutes
since everything turned dark and painful. Still no answer from Capt.
Punches. Now fires were burning closer as deposits of jet fuel ignited.
"You could hear them lighting off," Henson said. "They would go 'poof,'
kind of like when you light a furnace. You could hear these getting
closer." The two other men in the office couldn't get to Henson, but
they found a hole in the wall to crawl through. And they found help.
Minutes passed slowly as Henson remained trapped in the dark and more
conscious of every breath. He heard rubble crumbling and splashes like
footsteps in puddles. Then he saw a slice of light. "I'm a doctor, I'm
here to help you," said a voice. Navy Lt. Cmdr. David Tarantino, the
doctor, and Capt. David M. Thomas Jr. had dodged slithering electrical
wires and dripping solder to reach Henson. Tarantino, realizing Henson
was pinned, got on his back and lifted the table top with his feet enough
for Henson to slide out. Thomas and Tarantino pulled him back out through
the maze. With a blur of light and a rush of fresh air, Henson knew
he was safe. Jerry Henson, now 65, spent four days at nearby Arlington
Hospital Center. Doctors sewed up the gash in the back of his head and
on his chin. His neck was sprained, his back was sore, and he still
needed treatment for smoke inhalation. "I was eager to get out," he
said. "I thought the sooner I was able to get walking and breathing,
the better I'd avoid pneumonia and things like that." http://www.gomemphis.com/mca/america_at_war/article/0,1426,MCA_945_1300676,00.html

Holland
Nicholas

Nicholas
Holland, an engineer with AMEC Construction Management of Bethesda,
Md., had spent the last two years working to reinforce the walls. Two
summers ago, a blast wall of reinforced steel and concrete was installed
right where the plane hit. It stood for 25 minutes after it was hit
before collapsing, long enough for people to escape, Holland said. http://www.detnews.com/2001/nation/0109/11/nation-291261.htm

Hovis
Tom

Being
a former transport type (60's era) I cannot understand how that plane
hit where it did giving the direction the aircraft was taking at
the time. As most know, the Pentagon lies at the bottom of two hills
from the west with the east side being next to the river at 14th street
bridge. One hill is at the Navy Annex and the other is Arlington Cemetery.
The plane came up I-395 also known as Shirley Hwy. (most likely used
as a reference point.) The plane had been seen making a lazy pattern
in the no fly zone over the White House and US Cap. Why
the plane did not hit incoming traffic coming down the river from the
north to Reagan Nat'l. is beyond me. Strangely, no one at the
Reagan Tower noticed the aircraft. Andrews AFB radar should have also
picked up the aircraft I would think. Nevertheless, the aircarft went
southwest near Springfield and then veered left over Arlington and then
put the nose down coming over Ft Myer picking off trees and light poles
near the helicopter pad next to building. It was as if he leveled
out at the last minute and put it square into the building. The
wings came off as if it went through an arch way leaving a hole in the
side of the building it seems a little larger than the wide body
of the aircraft. The entry point was so clean that the roof (shown
in news photo) fell in on the wreckage. They are just now getting to
the passengers today. The nosewheel I understand is in the grass near
the second ring. Right now it is estimated that it will take two years
to repair the damage. Ironcally, the area had just been remodeled with
most of the area was still blocked off and some offices were empty.
I know a young Army Major who went to a planned staff meeting at 8:30
am sharp. He left his office and attended the meeting, there was something
he needed. He called his friend also a major near his office on his
cell phone. As they were talking his friend said, My God a plane has
just came through near your office "(which was not part of the new area,
but near it ). Fire rolled down the hallway, somehow his friend on the
phone ducked down another hallway. Four of the Major's friends did not
make it. Incidently, the fireball also went along the outside of the
building as shown by the blackend side of the building to left of the
impact point. The reason the fire took so long to put out was because
the attic was filled with "horse hair" for insulation put there in 1942
when the building was built.http://www.beanerbanner.com/a_father____.htm

Hunt
Bob

Bob Hunt, a member of the Sierra Times staff was in his Downtown Washington office
when the explosion at the Pentagon occurred. "About a third of the sky
was blacked with smoke", He said. Hunt was in contact with this office
via e-mail on September 11 until he left work and decided to walk, rather
than catch a crowded subway. "I talked to a number of average people
in route who said they saw the plane hovering over the Washington Mall
Area at an altitude lower that the height of the Washington Monument"
Hunt stated. He said they reported to him they could clearly see the
markings of an American Airlines airliner and some even said they could
make out faces of passengers in the aircraft windows. Again, this is
what Bob Hunt heard from witnesses on the street in Washington D.C.
on September 11, 2001.http://www.sierratimes.com/02/03/15/arjj031502.htm

Jarvis
Will

From
time spent on military aircraft as part of his job at the Pentagon,
Will Jarvis (who graduated with a bachelor of applied science in 1987
while attending New College) knows what aviation fuel smells like.
That smell was his only clue that a plane had crashed into the Pentagon,
where he works as an operations research analyst for the Office of the
Secretary of Defense. Jarvis, who was around the corner from the disaster,
tried but failed to see the plane when he left the building. "There
was just nothing left. It was incinerated. We couldn't see a tail or
a wing or anything," he says. "Just a big black hole in the building
with smoke pouring out of it." For someone sitting only 300 metres away
from the carnage of American Airlines Flight 77, Jarvis and his officemates
were surprisingly well insulated from it. "We thought the plane was
a dump truck backing into the building, because there was a lot of construction
going on," he says. The group noticed that the sky was darker than normal,
but still didn't think much of it. "Then I saw little bits of silver
falling from the sky," says Jarvis.http://www.magazine.utoronto.ca/02winter/f02.htm#jarvis

Terrance
Kean, 35, who lives in a 14-story building nearby, heard the loud jet
engines and glanced out his window. "I saw this very, very large passenger
jet," said the architect, who had been packing for a move. "It just
plowed right into the side of the Pentagon. The nose penetrated into
the portico. And then it sort of disappeared, and there was fire
and smoke everywhere. . . . It was very sort of surreal."http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn?pagename=article&node=&contentId=A13766-2001Sep11

Rep.
Mark Steven Kirk (R-Ill.), a Naval Reserve intelligence officer. ''Apparently,
the fire killed everybody in there,'' said Kirk, shortly after he learned
that two friends perished in the center. Kirk also went to the site.
''The first thing you smell is the burning. And then you can smell
the aviation fuel. And then you can smell this sickly, rotten-meat
smell,'' he said.

One
of the aircraft's engines somehow ricocheted out of the building and
arched into the Pentagon's mall parking area between the main building
and the new loading dock facility, said Charles H. Krohn, the Army's
deputy chief of public affairs. Those fleeing the building heard a
loud secondary explosion about 10 min. after the initial impact.http://www.aviationnow.com/content/publication/awst/20010917/aw48.htm

Lagasse
William

Sgt.
William Lagasse, a pentagon police dog handler, the son of an aviation
instructor, was filling up his patrol car at a gas station near the
Pentagon when he noticed a jet fly in low. He watched as the plane plowed
into the Pentagon. Initially, he thought the plane was about to drop
on top of him -- it was that close. Lagasse knew something was wrong.
The 757's flaps were not deployed and the landing gear was retracted.
http://206.181.245.163/ebird/e20011108vivid.htm

Lagasse
William

I
saw the aircraft above my head about 80 feet above the ground, 400 miles
an hour. The reason, I have some experience as a pilot and I looked
at the plane. Didn't see any landing gear. Didn't see any flaps down.
I realized it wasn't going to land. . . . It was close enough that
I could see the windows and the blinds had been pulled down. I read
American Airlines on it. . . .I got on the radio and broadcast. I said
a plane is, is heading toward the heliport side of the building. http://web.lexis-nexis.com...http://www2.hawaii.edu/~julianr/lexisnexis/lagasse1.txt

After
the second plane hit the World Trade Center, Major Lincoln Leibner jumped
in his pickup truck and raced to the Pentagon. As he ran to an entrance,
he heard jet engines and turned in time to see the American Airlines
plane diving toward the building. "I was close enough that I could
see through the windows of the airplane, and watch as it as it hit,"
he said. "There was no doubt in my mind what I was watching. Not for
a second. It was accelerating," he said. "It was wheels up,
flaps up, engines full throttle. " http://www.theosuobserver.com/main.cfm/include/smdetail/synid/54846.html

Liebner
Lincoln

Maj.
Leibner drove in and made it as far as the south parking lot, where
he got out on foot. "I heard the plane first," he said. "I thought it
was a flyover Arlington cemetery." From his vantage point, Maj. Leibner
looked up and saw the plane come in. "I was about 100 yards away,"
he said. "You could see through the windows of the aircraft.
I saw it hit." The plane came in hard and level and was flown full
throttle into the building, dead center mass, Maj. Leibner said.
"The plane completely entered the building," he said. "I got a little
repercussion, from the sound, the blast. I've heard artillery, and
that was louder than the loudest has to offer. I started running
toward the site. I jumped over a fence. I was probably the first person
on the scene." A tree and the backend of a crash truck at the heliport
near the crash site were on fire and the ground was scorched, Maj.
Leibner recounted. "The plane went into the building like a toy into
a birthday cake," he said. "The aircraft went in between the second
and third floors." At that point, no one was outside. Spotting a Pentagon
door that had been blown off its hinges, Maj. Leibner went in and out
several times, helping rescue several people. "The very first person
was right there," he said. "She could walk. I walked her out onto the
grass." Maj. Leibner said a police officer pulled up onto the grass
and began to help. "Everybody was hurt," Maj. Leibner said. "They were
all civilian females. Everybody was burned on their hands and faces.
http://www.usmedicine.com/article.cfm?articleID=384&issueID=38

Leibner
Lincoln

Captain
Lincoln Leibner says the aircraft struck a helicopter on the helipad,
setting fire to a fire truck. We got one guy out of the cab," he said,
adding he could hear people crying inside the wreckage. Captain Liebner,
who had cuts on his hands from the debris, says he has been parking
his car in the car park when the crash occurred."http://abc.net.au/news/2001/09/item20010911230953_1.htm

M.
K.

It
was so shocking, I was listening to the news on what had happened in
New York, and just happened to look out the window because I heard a
low flying plane and then I saw it hit the Pentagon. It happened so
fast... it was in the air one moment and in the building the next...
I still have a hard time believing it, but every time I look out
the window, it seems to be more real than it did the time before...
K.M., Pentagon City, USAhttp://newsvote.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/talking%5Fpoint/newsid%5F1537000/1537530.stm

Marra
David

David
Marra, 23, an information-technology specialist, had turned his BMW
off an I-395 exit to the highway just west of the Pentagon when he saw
an American Airlines jet swooping in, its wings wobbly, looking like
it was going to slam right into the Pentagon: "It was 50 ft. off the
deck when he came in. It sounded like the pilot had the throttle
completely floored. The plane rolled left and then rolled right.
Then he caught an edge of his wing on the ground." There is a helicopter
pad right in front of the side of the Pentagon. The wing touched there,
then the plane cartwheeled into the building.http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,174655-4,00.html

Martinez
Oscar

``I
saw a big jet flying close to the building coming at full speed. There
was a big noise when it hit the building,'' said Oscar Martinez,
who witnessed the attack. Extrait article : Away from the Pentagon,
unexplained explosions were reported in the vicinity of the State Department
and the Capitol. http://www.firehouse.com/terrorist/11_APdc.html

McAdams

Daniel
and his wife Cynthia McAdams : Two other witnesses, Daniel McAdams and
his wife, Cynthia, said they were sitting in their kitchen drinking
coffee in their third-floor condominium in Arlington, Va., just two
miles from the Pentagon when they heard a plane fly directly overhead
around 9:45 a.m. It was unusually loud and low. Seconds later, they
heard a big boom and felt the doors and windows of their three-story
building shake. From their window, they could see a plume of black smoke
coming from the Pentagon. I said, Oh my God, ... I can t even come to
grips. It s just a shock, said Daniel McAdams, a freelance journalist.
It s scary to just be so close .... Who knows if there's another one
being hijacked that could miss the target? I feel like a target here.
Soon after, military planes including F-15s were circling the Pentagon.
Traffic clogged McAdams street as workers fled. http://www.delawareonline.com/newsjournal/local/2001/09/pdf/09112001EXTRA2.pdf

Traffic
is normally slow right around the Pentagon as the road winds and we
line up to cross the 14th Street bridge heading into the District of
Columbia. I don't know what made me look up, but I did and I saw a very
low-flying American Airlines plane that seemed to be accelerating. My
first thought was just 'No, no, no, no,' because it was obvious the
plane was not heading to nearby Reagan National Airport. It was going
to crash. http://depts.washington.edu/uweek/archives/2001.10.OCT_04/_article9.html

McGraw
Stephen

Father
Stephen McGraw was driving to a graveside service at Arlington National
Cemetery the morning of Sept. 11, when he mistakenly took the Pentagon
exit onto Washington Boulevard, putting him in a position to witness
American Airlines Flight 77 crash into the Pentagon. "The traffic was
very slow moving, and at one point just about at a standstill," said
McGraw, a Catholic priest at St. Anthony Parish in Falls Church. "I
was in the left hand lane with my windows closed. I did not hear anything
at all until the plane was just right above our cars." McGraw estimates
that the plane passed about 20 feet over his car, as he waited in the
left hand lane of the road, on the side closest to the Pentagon. "The
plane clipped the top of a light pole just before it got to us, injuring
a taxi driver, whose taxi was just a few feet away from my car. "I saw
it crash into the building," he said. "My only memories really were
that it looked like a plane coming in for a landing. I mean in the sense
that it was controlled and sort of straight. That was my impression,"
he said. "There was an explosion and a loud noise and I felt the
impact. I remember seeing a fireball come out of two windows (of the
Pentagon). I saw an explosion of fire billowing through those two windows.
"He literally had the stole in one hand and a prayer book in the other
and in one fluid motion crossed the guardrail," said Mark Faram, a reporter
from the Navy Times who witnessed McGraw in the first moments after
the crash. http://www.dcmilitary.com/army/pentagram/6_39/local_news/10772-1.htmlhttp://www.mdw.army.mil/news/Pentagon%5Fcrash%5Feyewitness%5Fcomforted%5Fvictims.html

McClellan
Kenneth

The
crew of a military cargo plane watched helplessly on Sept. 11 as a hijacked
airliner plunged into the Pentagon, a defense official confirmed Tuesday.
The report confirms the eyewitness account of two Hampton Roads residents
who were near the Pentagon that day and said they saw a second plane
flying near the doomed passenger jet.A C-130 cargo plane had departed
Andrews Air Force Base en route to Minnesota that morning and reported
seeing an airliner heading into Washington 'at an unusual angle,' said
Lt. Col. Kenneth McClellan, a Pentagon spokesman.Air-traffic control
officials instructed the propeller-powered cargo plane 'to let us know
where it's going,' McClellan said. But, he said, there was no attempt
to intercept the hijacked airliner. 'A C-130 obviously goes slower than
a jet,' McClellan said. 'There was no way he was going to intercept
anything.' The C-130 pilot 'followed the aircraft and reported it was
heading into the Pentagon,' he said. 'He saw it crash into the building.
He saw the fireball. In the days immediately following the Sept. 11
hijackings, the Pentagon had no knowledge of the C-130's encounter,
because all reports were classified by the Air National Guard, the Pentagon
spokesman said. 'It was very hard to get any information out,' McClellan
said. ("C-130 crew saw Pentagon strike, official confirms", Terry Scanlon
et David Lerman, Daily Press, 17 octobre 2001) - http://dailypress.com

McNair
Phil

Crawling,
McNair turned toward the E Ring. The heat grew even fiercer, and as
he neared the door to the corridor he saw bright orange through
the crack along its bottom. He reversed course, yelling, ``We've got
to get out the other way.'' http://www.pilotonline.com/special/911/pentagon2.html

The
worker, William Middleton Sr., was running his street sweeper through
the cemetery when he heard a harsh whistling sound overhead. Middleton
looked up and spotted a commercial jet whose pilot seemed to be fighting
with his own craft. Middleton said the plane was no higher than the
tops of telephone poles as it lurched toward the Pentagon. The jet
accelerated in the final few hundred yards before it tore into the
building.http://www.s-t.com/daily/12-01/12-20-01/a02wn018.htm

Milburn
Kirk

I
was right underneath the plane, said Kirk Milburn, a construction supervisor
for Atlantis Co., who was on the Arlington National Cemetery exit of
Interstate 395 when he said he saw the plane heading for the Pentagon.
"I heard a plane. I saw it. I saw debris flying. I guess it was hitting
light poles," said Milburn. "It was like a WHOOOSH whoosh, then there
was fire and smoke, then I heard a second explosion." - (Washington
Post, September 11, 2001) - http://
www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/metro/daily/sep01/attack.html

Mitchell
Terry

This
is a hole in -- there was a punch-out. They suspect that this was where
a part of the aircraft came through this hole, although I didn't
see any evidence of the aircraft down there. (...) This pile here
is all Pentagon metal. None of that is aircraft whatsoever. As
you can see, they've punched a hole in here. This was punched by the
rescue workers to clean it out. You can see this is the -- some of
the unrenovated areas where the windows have blown out. http://www.patriotresource.com/wtc/federal/0915/DoD.html

Moody
Sheila

Sheila
Moody, in Room 472, heard a whoosh and a whistle and she wondered where
all this air was coming from. Then a blast of fire that left as fast
as it came. She looked down and saw her hands aflame, so she shook
them. She saw some light from a window but could not reach it and could
not find anything to break it with in any case. Then she heard a voice.
"Hello!" a man called out. "I can't see you." Hello, she called back,
and clapped her hands. She heard him approach and sensed the shoosh
of a fire extinguisher and then saw him through a cloud of smoke, the
rescuer who would bring her out and ease her fear that she would never
get to see her grandchildren.http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A38407-2001Sep15

Morin
Terry

Terry
Morin, a former USMC aviator, Program Manager for SPARTA, Inc was working
as a contractor at the BMDO offices at the old Navy Annex. Having just
reached the elevator in the 5th Wing of BMDO Federal Office Building
(FOB) #2. He heard "an increasingly loud rumbling" One to two seconds
later the airliner came into my field of view. By that time the noise
was absolutely deafening. The aircraft was essentially right over the
top of me and the outer portion of the FOB (flight path parallel the
outer edge of the FOB). Everything was shaking and vibrating, including
the ground. I estimate that the aircraft was no more than 100 feet above
me (30 to 50 feet above the FOB) in a slight nose down attitude. The
plane had a silver body with red and blue stripes down the fuselage.
I believed at the time that it belonged to American Airlines, but I
couldn't be sure. It looked like a 737 and I so reported to authorities.
Within seconds the plane cleared the 8th Wing of BMDO and was heading
directly towards the Pentagon. Engines were at a steady high-pitched
whine, indicating to me that the throttles were steady and full.
I estimated the aircraft speed at between 350 and 400 knots. The flight
path appeared to be deliberate, smooth, and controlled. As the aircraft
approached the Pentagon, I saw a minor flash (later found out that the
aircraft had sheared off a portion of a highway light pole down on Hwy
110). As the aircraft flew ever lower I started to lose sight of the
actual airframe as a row of trees to the Northeast of the FOB blocked
my view. I could now only see the tail of the aircraft. I believe I
saw the tail dip slightly to the right indicating a minor turn in that
direction. The tail was barely visible when I saw the flash and subsequent
fireball rise approximately 200 feet above the Pentagon. There was
a large explosion noise and the low frequency sound echo that
comes with this type of sound. Associated with that was the increase
in air pressure, momentarily, like a small gust of wind. For those formerly
in the military, it sounded like a 2000lb bomb going off roughly
― mile in front of you. At once there was a huge cloud of black smoke
that rose several hundred feet up. Elapsed time from hearing the
initial noise to when I saw the impact flash was between 12 and 15 seconds.
(...) the aircraft had been flown directly into the Pentagon without
hitting the ground first or skipping into the building. (...) The
firemen were appreciative, as the heat inside the building generated
from the 8,500 gallons of jet fuel was, in their words, "unbelievable."
It was reported that at least three of the fireman had to be given IV
fluids due to the extreme heat. http://www.coping.org/911/survivor/pentagon.htm

A
silver, twin-engine American Airlines jetliner gliding almost noiselessly
over the Navy Annex, fast, low and straight toward the Pentagon, just
hundreds of yards away. It was a nightmare coming to life. The plane,
with red and blue markings, hurtled by and within moments exploded in
a ground-shaking "whoomp" as it appeared to hit the side of the Pentagon.
A huge flash of orange flame and black smoke poured into
the sky. Smoke seemed to change from black to white, forming
a billowing column in the sky.http://www.navytimes.com/story.php?f=1-292925-467181.php

Murphy
Peter M.

Mr.
Peter M. Murphy : No Marine Corps offices were closer to the impact
point than those of Mr. Peter M. Murphy, the Counsel for the Commandant
of the Marine Corps and the most senior civilian working for the Marine
Corps. Mr. Murphy and Major Joe D. Baker were having a discussion in
Mr. Murphy's office on the fourth floor of the Pentagon's outermost
ring, the E-Ring, overlooking the helo-pad. With CNN on a TV monitor
across the room, they stopped their discussion when the news of the
World Trade Center attacks came on. After watching awhile, Mr. Murphy
asked Mr. Robert D. Hogue, his Deputy Counsel, to check with their administrative
clerk, Corporal Timothy J. Garofola, on the current security status
of the Pentagon. Garofola had just received an e-mail from the security
manager to all Department of Defense employees that the threat condition
remained "normal." He passed this information to Hogue, who stepped
back into the doorway of Mr. Murphy's office to relay the message. At
that instant, a tremendous explosion with what Mr. Murphy said was a
noise "louder than any noise he had ever heard" shook the room.
Mr. Murphy, who had been standing with his back to the window, was knocked
entirely across the room, while Hogue was jolted into his office.
Garofola's desk literally rose straight up several inches then slammed
down. The airplane had crashed almost directly below Mr. Murphy's
offices. The floor buckled at the expansion joint that ran between
the two offices and created a discernible step up between the two rooms.
The air was filled with dust particles, and the ceiling tiles fell,
leaving the lights dangling from their electrical connections; the building
was crumbling.The men did not know what had hit them, but they did know
that it was time to get out. There was no panic, just a shock-hazed
determination to survive. Hogue went to Garofola and told him to "get
us out of here." The corporal attempted to open the heavy magnetized
door, but it had been jammed and did not budge. Then, Mr. Murphy saw
the "Marine" come out in Garofola. He yanked the door as hard as he
could and it came open. http://www.mca-marines.org/Leatherneck/nov01pentagonarch.htm

"The
plane exploded after it hit, the tail came off and it began burning
immediately. Within five minutes, police and emergency vehicles
began arriving," said Vin Narayanan, a reporter at USA TODAY.com,
who was driving near the Pentagon when the plane hit.http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2001/09/11/washscene.htm

Narayanan
Vin

At 9:35
a.m., I pulled alongside the Pentagon. With traffic at a standstill,
my eyes wandered around the road, looking for the cause of the traffic
jam. Then I looked up to my left and saw an American Airlines jet
flying right at me. The jet roared over my head, clearing my car by
about 25 feet. The tail of the plane clipped the overhanging exit
sign above me as it headed straight at the Pentagon. The windows
were dark on American Airlines Flight 77 as it streaked toward
its target, only 50 yards away. The hijacked jet slammed into the
Pentagon at a ferocious speed. But the Pentagon's wall held up
like a champ. It barely budged as the nose of the plane curled upwards
and crumpled before exploding into a massive fireball. The people
who built that wall should be proud. Its ability to withstand the
initial impact of the jet probably saved thousands of lives. I hopped
out of my car after the jet exploded, nearly oblivious to a second
jet hovering in the skies. Hands shaking, I borrowed a cell phone
to call my mom and tell her I was safe. Then I called into work, to
let them know what happened. But not once was I able to take my eyes
off the inferno in front of me. I think I saw the bodies of passengers
burning. But I'm not sure. It could have been Pentagon workers. It
could have been my mind playing tricks on me. I hope it was my mind
playing tricks on me. The highway was filled with shocked commuters,
walking around in a daze.http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2001/09/17/first-person.htm

O'Brien

At
the Dulles tower, O'Brien saw the TV pictures from New York and headed
back to her post to help other planes quickly land. "We started moving
the planes as quickly as we could," she says. "Then I noticed the aircraft.
It was an unidentified plane to the southwest of Dulles, moving at a
very high rate of speed … I had literally a blip and nothing more."
O'Brien asked the controller sitting next to her, Tom Howell, if he
saw it too. "I said, 'Oh my God, it looks like he's headed to the White
House,'" recalls Howell. "I was yelling … 'We've got a target headed
right for the White House!'" At a speed of about 500 miles an hour,
the plane was headed straight for what is known as P-56, protected air
space 56, which covers the White House and the Capitol. "The speed,
the maneuverability, the way that he turned, we all thought in the radar
room, all of us experienced air traffic controllers, that that was a
military plane," says O'Brien. "You don't fly a 757 in that manner.
It's unsafe." The plane was between 12 and 14 miles away, says O'Brien,
"and it was just a countdown. Ten miles west. Nine miles west … Our
supervisor picked up our line to the White House and started relaying
to them the information, [that] we have an unidentified very fast-moving
aircraft inbound toward your vicinity, 8 miles west." Vice President
Cheney was rushed to a special basement bunker. White House staff members
were told to run away from the building. "And it went six, five, four.
And I had it in my mouth to say, three, and all of a sudden the plane
turned away. In the room, it was almost a sense of relief. This must
be a fighter. This must be one of our guys sent in, scrambled to patrol
our capital, and to protect our president, and we sat back in our chairs
and breathed for just a second," says O'Brien. But the plane continued
to turn right until it had made a 360-degree maneuver. "We lost
radar contact with that aircraft. And we waited. And we waited. And
your heart is just beating out of your chest waiting to hear what's
happened," says O'Brien. "And then the Washington National [Airport]
controllers came over our speakers in our room and said, 'Dulles, hold
all of our inbound traffic. The Pentagon's been hit.'" http://www.abcnews.go.com/sections/2020/2020/2020_011024_atc_feature.html

O'Keefe
John

Northern
Virginia resident John O'Keefe was one of the commuters who witnessed
the attack on the Pentagon. 'I was going up 395, up Washington Blvd.,
listening to the the news, to WTOP, and from my left side-I don't know
whether I saw or heard it first- I saw a silver plane I immediately
recognized it as an American Airlines jet,' said the 25-year-old O'Keefe,
managing editor of Influence, an American Lawyer Media publication about
lobbying. 'It came swooping in over the highway, over my left shoulder,
straight across where my car was heading. I'd just heard them saying
on the radio that National Airport was closing, and I thought, That's
not going to make it to National Airport." And then I realized where
I was, and that it was going to hit the Pentagon. There was a burst
of orange flame that shot out that I could see through the highway
overpass. Then it was just black. Just black, thick smoke.'" http://www.lexisone.com/news/nlibrary/b091201a.html

O'Keefe
John

"I
don't know whether I saw or heard it first -- this silver plane; I immediately
recognized it as an American Airlines jet," said the 25-year-old O'Keefe,
managing editor of Influence, an American Lawyer Media publication about
lobbying. "It came swooping in over the highway, over my left shoulder,
straight across where my car was heading. "The eeriest thing about it,
was that it was like you were watching a movie. There was no huge explosion,
no huge rumbling on ground, it just went 'pfff'. It wasn't
what I would have expected for a plane that was not much more than a
football field away from me. "The first thing I did was pull over
onto the shoulder, and when I got out of the car I saw another
plane flying over my head, and it scared ...me, because I knew there
had been two planes that hit the World Trade Center. And I started jogging
up the ramp to get as far away as possible. "Then the plane -- it looked
like a C-130 cargo plane -- started turning away from the Pentagon,
it did a complete turnaround. http://www.nylawyer.com/news/01/09/091201l.html

O'Keefe
John

"There
was a burst of orange flame that shot out that I could see through the
highway overpass. Then it was just black. Just black thick smoke. "The
eeriest thing about it, was that it was like you were watching a movie.
There was no huge explosion, no huge rumbling on ground, it just went
'pfff'. It wasn't what I would have expected for a plane that was not
much more than a football field away from me. http://www.nylawyer.com/news/01/09/091201l.html

Owens
Mary Ann

Mary
Ann Owens, a journalist with Gannett News Service - was driving along
by the side of the Pentagon. Here, she recalls the events of that horrific
day and her feelings about the tragedy 12 months on. The sound of sudden
and certain death roared in my ears as I sat lodged in gridlock on Washington
Boulevard, next to the Pentagon on September 11. Up to that moment I
had only experienced shock by the news coming from New York City and
frustration with the worse-than-normal traffic snarl ... but it wasn't
until I heard the demon screaming of that engine that I expected to
die. Between the Pentagon's helicopter pad, which sits next to the road,
and Reagan Washington National Airport a couple of miles south, aviation
noise is common along my commute to the silver office towers in Rosslyn
where Gannett Co Inc. were housed last autumn. But this engine noise
was different. It was too sudden, too loud, too encompassing. Looking
up didn't tell me what type of plane it was because it was so close
I could only see the bottom. Realising the Pentagon was its target,
I didn't think the careering, full-throttled craft would get that far.
Its downward angle was too sharp, its elevation of maybe 50 feet, too
low. Street lights toppled as the plane barely cleared the Interstate
395 overpass. Gripping the steering wheel of my vibrating car, I involuntarily
ducked as the wobbling plane thundered over my head. Once it passed,
I raised slightly and grimaced as the left wing dipped and scraped
the helicopter area just before the nose crashed into the southwest
wall of the Pentagon. Still gripping the wheel, I could feel both the
car and my heart jolt at the moment of impact. An instant inferno
blazed about 125 yards from me. The plane, the wall and the victims
disappeared under coal-black smoke, three-storey tall flames and intense
heat. As the thudding stopped, screams of horror and hysteria rose from
the line of cars (…) The full impact of actually being alive overwhelmed
me. A mere 125 yards had made me a witness instead of a casualty. Survival
wasn't a miracle, it was luck ... pure luck.http://www.thisislocallondon.co.uk/news/display.var.624436.Top+Stories.0.html

Owens
Mary Ann

Gannett
News Service employee Mary Ann Owens was stopped in traffic on the road
that runs past the Pentagon, listening on the radio to the news of the
World Trade Center attacks, when she heard a loud roar overhead and
looked up as the plane barely cleared the highway. "Instantly I knew
what was happening, and I involuntarily ducked as the plane passed perhaps
50 to 75 feet above the roof of my car at great speed," Owens said.
"The plane slammed into the west wall of the Pentagon. The impact
was deafening. The fuselage hit the ground and blew up." http://www.delawareonline.com/newsjournal/local/2001/09/12terrorspreadsto.html

Patterson
Steve

Steve
Patterson, who lives in Pentagon City, said it appeared to him that
a commuter jet swooped over Arlington National Cemetery and headed
for the Pentagon "at a frightening rate .‚.‚. just slicing into that
building." Steve Patterson, 43, said he was watching television reports
of the World Trade Center being hit when he saw a silver commuter jet
fly past the window of his 14th-floor apartment in Pentagon City. The
plane was about 150 yards away, approaching from the west about
20 feet off the ground, Patterson said. He said the plane, which
sounded like the high-pitched squeal of a fighter jet, flew over Arlington
cemetary so low that he thought it was going to land on I-395. He said
it was flying so fast that he couldn't read any writing on the side.
The plane, which appeared to hold about eight to 12 people, headed
straight for the Pentagon but was flying as if coming in for a landing
on a nonexistent runway, Patterson said. "At first I thought 'Oh my
God, there's a plane truly misrouted from National,'" Patterson said.
"Then this thing just became part of the Pentagon .‚.‚. I was watching
the World Trade Center go and then this. It was like Oh my God, what's
next?" He said the plane, which approached the Pentagon below treetop
level, seemed to be flying normally for a plane coming in for a landing
other than going very fast for being so low. Then, he said, he saw the
Pentagon "envelope" the plane and bright orange flames shoot out
the back of the building. "It looked like a normal landing, as if someone
knew exactly what they were doing," said Patterson, a graphics artist
who works at home. "This looked intentional.".
Barbara Vobejda - Washington Post Staff Writer - Sept. 11, 4:59 PMhttp://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/metro/daily/sep01/attack.html

Perkal
Don

The
airliner crashed between two and three hundred feet from my office in
the Pentagon, just around a corner from where I work. I'm the deputy
General Counsel, Washington Headquarters Services, Office of the Secretary
of Defense. (…) My colleagues felt the impact, which reminded them of
an earthquake. People shouted in the corridor outside that a bomb
had gone off upstairs on the main concourse in the building. No
alarms sounded. I walked to my office, shut down my computer, and headed
out. Even before stepping outside I could smell the cordite.
Then I knew explosives had been set off somewhere. I looked to
my right and saw a raging fire and smoke careening off the facade to
the sky. (…) Two explosions, a few minutes apart, prompted me to start
walking. http://www.mcsweeneys.net/2001/09/19perkal.html

Peterson
Christine

October
18, 2001 - Christine Peterson, '73 found herself in the thick of last
month's terrorist tragedy, and submitted this report. It offers a personal
perspective on the events in Washington, D.C., which have perhaps been
overshadowed in the media by the scope of the horrors in New York. It
was 9:30 a.m. on Tuesday, September 11th, and traffic was terrible.
For all of my twenty-eight years living in the Washington, D.C. area,
terrible traffic was a constant. I'd been in Boston the day before and
gotten home late. That morning I repacked my suitcase because I was
heading out to San Francisco on the 3:20 p.m. flight. I just needed
a few hours in the office first, and now I was officially late for work.
I was at a complete stop on the road in front of the helipad at the
Pentagon; what I had thought would be a shortcut was as slow as the
other routes I had taken that morning. I looked idly out my window to
the left -- and saw a plane flying so low I said, "holy cow, that plane
is going to hit my car" (not my actual words). The car shook as the
plane flew over. It was so close that I could read the numbers under
the wing. And then the plane crashed. My mind could not comprehend what
had happened. Where did the plane go? For some reason I expected
it to bounce off the Pentagon wall in pieces. But there was no plane
visible, only huge billows of smoke and torrents of fire. (…) A
few minutes later a second, much smaller explosion got the attention
of the police arriving on the scene. http://www.naualumni.com/News/News.cfm?ID=613&c=4

Pfeilstucker
Daniel C. Jr

Daniel
C. Pfeilstucker Jr., caught in the flying debris, didn't know if he
was going to make it out alive. The Pentagon was on fire. "It was horrifying,"
Mr. Pfeilstucker says (…) Danny Pfeilstucker is a commissioning agent
for John J. Kirlin Inc., a Maryland-based mechanical contracting company
that worked on the Pentagon renovation project that was nearing completion
September 11. (…) Kirlin Inc., among many companies involved in renovating
the Pentagon since the early 1990s, was in charge of updating plumbing
and heating units. Around 9:30 a.m., Mr. Pfeilstucker and a co-worker
got orders to check a hot-water leak in a third-floor office on the
western side. After doing so, he stepped off an elevator on the second
floor in Corridor 4, ladder in hand. Suddenly the walls and the ceiling
began to collapse around him. The lights went out. "It went from light
to dark to orange to complete black," Mr. Pfeilstucker says. "It was
so dark I couldn't even see my hand in front of my face."Within seconds,
his left leg buckled. Unable to grab on to anything, he was thrust 70
feet down the corridor and into a tiny telephone closet halfway down
the hallway connecting E Ring and A Ring. All I know is that the blast
must have pushed open the steel door to the closet," says Mr.
Pfeilstucker, who had been 40 feet away from the plane's point of
impact.He remembers shutting the door and trying to stand up, not
understanding what had just happened. "I thought it was some sort of
a construction blast," Mr. Pfeilstucker says. "Or maybe there was a
helicopter accident." His hard hat and work goggles were blown away.
His ladder also had disappeared. (…) The fire sprinklers came on as
the temperature shot up.Then he smelled jet fuel and smoke. The putrid
odor was seeping into the closet."It was this odor that I can't describe,
but one that I'll never forget, that's for sure," Mr. Pfeilstucker
says. "It was so hard to breathe. I didn't think I was going to make
it out."http://www.washtimes.com/september11/heaven.htm

Plaisted

Plaisted,
an artist, was sitting at her desk at home less than one mile from
the Pentagon ... I jumped up from my chair as the screeching and
whining of the engine got even louder and I looked out the window to
the West just in time to see the belly of that aircraft and the tail
section fly directly over my house at treetop height. It was utterly
sickening to see, knowing that this plane was going to crash. The sound
was so incredibly piercing and shrill- the engines were straining to
keep the plane aloft. It is a sound I will never stop hearing- and I
now imagine the screams of the innocent passengers were commingled with
the sounds of the engines and I am haunted. I was unaware at this time
that the World Trade center had been attacked so I thought this was
just" a troubled plane en route to the airport. I started to run toward
my front door but the plane was going so fast at this point that it
only took 4 or 5 seconds before I heard a tremendously loud crash
and books on my shelves started tumbling to the floor.http://arlingtondpca.homestead.comhttp://www.wherewereyou.org
contribution #1148

Probst
Frank

Frank
Probst : a Pentagon renovation worker and retired Army officer, he was
inspecting newly installed telecommunications wiring inside the five-story,
6.5-million-square-foot building.The tall, soft-spoken Probst had a
10 a.m. meeting. About 9:25 a.m., he stopped by the renovation workers'
trailer just south of the Pentagon heliport. Someone had a television
turned on in the trailer's break room that showed smoke pouring out
of the twin towers in New York. "The Pentagon would make a pretty good
target," someone in the break room commented. The thought stuck with
Probst as he picked up his notebook and walked to the North Parking
Lot to attend his meeting. Probst took a sidewalk alongside Route 27,
which runs near the Pentagon's western face. Traffic was at a standstill
because of a road accident. Then, at about 9:35 a.m., he saw the airliner
in the cloudless September sky.American Airlines Flight 77 approached
from the west, coming in low over the nearby five-story Navy Annex on
a hill overlooking the Pentagon. He has lights off, wheels up, nose
down," Probst recalled. The plane seemed to be accelerating directly
toward him. He froze. "I knew I was dead," he said later. "The only
thing I thought was, 'Damn, my wife has to go to another funeral, and
I'm not going to see my two boys again.'." He dove to his right. He
recalls the engine passing on one side of him, about six feet away.
The plane's right wing went through a generator trailer "like butter,"
Probst said. The starboard engine hit a low cement wall and blew apart.
He still can't remember the sound of the explosion. Sometimes the memory
starts to come back when he hears a particularly low-flying airliner
heading into nearby Reagan National Airport, or when military jets fly
over a burial at Arlington National Cemetery. Most of the time, though,
his memory is silent."It was pretty horrible," he said of the noiseless
images he carries inside him, of the jet vanishing in a cloud of
smoke and dust, and bits of metal and concrete drifting down
like confetti. On either side of him, three streetlights had been
sheared in half by the airliner's wings at 12 to 15 feet above the ground.
An engine had clipped the antenna off a Jeep Grand Cherokee stalled
in traffic not far away.http://www.militarycity.com/sept11/fortress1.html

Probst
Frank

"I
was standing on the sidewalk (parallel to the site of impact)...and
I saw this plane coming right at me at what seemed like 300 miles an
hour. I dove towards the ground and watched this great big engine
from this beautiful airplane just vaporize," said Frank Probst,
a member of the Pentagon renovations crew commented. "It looked like
a huge fireball, pieces were flying out everywhere."http://www.dcmilitary.com/army/pentagram/6_55/local_news/10660-1.html

Ragland
Clyde

Naval
officer Clyde Ragland, who works near the Pentagon, was stuck in his
office because the streets outside were clogged with traffic. He and
his co-workers were watching television reports of the disaster in New
York when "we gazed out our own windows and, to our horror and disbelief,
saw huge billows of black smoke rising from the northeast, in the direction
of D.C. and the river . . . and the Pentagon." Ragland described billowing
black smoke and "what looked like white confetti raining down everywhere."
He said it soon became apparent "that the 'confetti' was little bits
of airplane, falling down after being flung high into the bright, blue
sky."http://bernie.house.gov/documents/articles/20010912170838.asphttp://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la%2D091201main.story

Rains
Lon

Eyewitness:
The Pentagon By Lon Rains Editor, Space News - In light traffic the
drive up Interstate 395 from Springfield to downtown Washington takes
no more than 20 minutes. But that morning, like many others, the traffic
slowed to a crawl just in front of the Pentagon. With the Pentagon to
the left of my van at about 10 o'clock on the dial of a clock, I glanced
at my watch to see if I was going to be late for my appointment. At
that moment I heard a very loud, quick whooshing sound that began behind
me and stopped suddenly in front of me and to my left. In fractions
of a second I heard the impact and an explosion. The next thing I saw
was the fireball. I was convinced it was a missile. It came in so fast
it sounded nothing like an airplane. Friends and colleagues have asked
me if I felt a shock wave and I honestly do not know. I felt something,
but I don't know if it was a shock wave or the fact that I jumped so
hard I strained against the seat belt and shoulder harness and was thrown
back into my seat. 'http://www.space.com/news/rains_september11-1.html

Ramos

When
she thinks of that day, Ramos also recalls another burn patient whom
she treated just after getting Maj. Leibner into the ambulance. "I turned
around and a burn patient was coming out," she said. "I was afraid I'd
be caught with her in the line of fire." The woman's clothes were literally
exploded off her body, Ramos said. "Her legs were so bad that her skin
was coming off," she said. "She was really in shock. She had like a
vacant stare. She was all sweaty, her legs were burned, and her clothes
were blasted off her back because her back was bare. We got her onto
a stretcher face down and DiDi started an IV, and they were ready to
take her into the ambulance. We evacuated at that point." They later
heard that the burn patient died a couple of days afterward. The victims
exited the building in waves, but after a short while they stopped coming
out. "After the first hour, it was very frustrating," Ramos said. "You
felt hopeless," added Lopez. "You can't go in and no one is coming out."
Ramos said she still gets galvanic skin responses when she recalls the
events of that morning. "Everything was so busy, you couldn't remember
everything," she said. (…)It took some time before Ramos, Maj. Leibner
and others were able to talk openly of their experiences that day. "We
went to several debriefings," Ramos said.http://www.usmedicine.com/article.cfm?articleID=384&issueID=38

Rasmusen
Floyd

Floyd
Rasmusen, a senior management analyst at the Pentagon, was inside.
"All of a sudden all of my telephones cut off," he said. "I heard
an explosion. All of a sudden I saw all of this flaming debris
come flying toward me." He got his staff out of the building.
http://www.abqtrib.com/archives/news01/091201_news_dcscene.shtml

Rick
Renzi a law student - ''The plane came in at an incredibly steep angle
with incredibly high speed,''... was driving by the Pentagon at the
time of the crash about 9:40 a.m. The impact created a huge yellow
and orange fireball, he added. Renzi, who was interviewed at the
scene by FBI agents, said he stopped his car to watch and saw another
plane following and turn off after the first craft's impact.http://www.pittsburgh.com/partners/wpxi/news/pentagonattack.html

Robbins
James S

James
S Robbins a national-security analyst & 'nationalreviewonline' contributor:
"I was standing, looking out my large office window, which faces west
and from six stories up has a commanding view of the Potomac and the
Virginia heights." "The Pentagon is about a mile and half distant in
the center of the tableau. I was looking directly at it when the aircraft
struck. The sight of the 757 diving in at an unrecoverable angle is
frozen in my memory, but at the time. " I did not immediately comprehend
what I was witnessing. There was a silvery flash, an explosion, and
a dark, mushroom shaped cloud rose over the building. I froze, gaping
for a second until the sound of the detonation, a sharp pop at
that distance, shook me out of it. " http://www.nationalreview.com/robbins/robbins040902.asp

Lt.
Commander John Sayer, a Navy reservist, was riding on a bus when he
heard a thud. "It sounded like a very loud clap," he said. "At
first I thought an airplane had hit in front of the Pentagon, but when
I got closer I saw that it had struck the Pentagon."http://www.abqtrib.com/archives/news01/091201_news_dcscene.shtml

Schickler
Rob

Rob
Schickler, a Baylor University 2001 graduate and Arlington, Va. resident,
said. "A plane flew over my house," (one mile away from the Pentagon).
"It was loud, but not unusual because the [Ronald Reagan Washington
National Airport] is by my house, on the other side of the Pentagon.
Occasionally planes that miss the landing fly over my house." "A few
seconds later, there was this sonic boom," he said. "The house shook,
the windows were vibrating." "There was a hole in the building,
and you could smell it in the air. It's a beautiful day, but you can
smell the burning concrete and burning jet fuel."http://www3.baylor.edu/Lariat/091201/alumni.html

Scott
Don

Don Scott,
a Prince William County school bus driver living in Woodbridge, was
driving eastward past the Pentagon on his way to an appointment at
Walter Reed Army Medical Center:"I had just passed the Pentagon and
was near the Macy's store in Crystal City when I noticed a plane making
a sharp turn from north of the Pentagon. I had to look back at the
road and then back to the plane as it sort of leveled off. I looked
back at the road, and when I turned to look again, I felt and heard
a terrible explosion. I looked back and saw flames shooting up and
smoke starting to climb into the sky."Washington Post, 9/16/01(Lexis
Nexis) http://web.lexis-nexis.com...http://www2.hawaii.edu/~julianr/lexisnexis/scott.txt

Seibert
Tom

Tom
Seibert : "We heard what sounded like a missile, then we heard a loud
boom," said Tom Seibert, 33, a network engineer at the Pentagon. "We
were sitting there and watching this thing from New York, and I said,
you know, the next best target would be us. And five minutes later,
boom."http://www.guardian.co.uk/wtccrash/story/0%2C1300%2C550486%2C00.html

Sepulveda
Noel

Noel
Sepulveda, a Master Sgt. received the awards during a special ceremony
at the Pentagon April 15. He left Bolling Air Force Base, D.C., for
a meeting at the Pentagon, only to be told it was cancelled. Walking
back to his motorcycle he saw a commercial airliner coming from the
direction of Henderson Hall the Marine Corps headquarters.. It "flew
above a nearby hotel and drop its landing gear. The plane's right
wheel struck a light pole, causing it to fly at a 45-degree angle",
he said. The plane tried to recover, but hit a second light pole and
continued flying at an angle. "You could hear the engines being revved
up even higher," The plane dipped its nose and crashed into the southwest
side of the Pentagon. "The right engine hit high, the left engine
hit low. For a brief moment, you could see the body of the plane
sticking out from the side of the building. Then a ball of fire came
from behind it." An explosion followed, sending Sepulveda flying against
a light pole. "if the airliner had not hit the light poles, it
would have slammed into the Pentagon's 9th and 10th corridor "A" ring,
and the loss of life would have been greater."http://www.jimroche.com/pentagon_hero.htmhttp://www.af.mil/news/Apr2002/n20020415_0585.shtml

Sepulveda
Noel

Recognition
of Master Sergeant Noel Sepulveda : (…) on September 11, 2001, Master
Sergeant Noel Sepulveda was on assignment at the Pentagon as a Medic.
He was standing in the parking lot at the Pentagon when he noticed a
jetliner lower its landing gear as if to make a landing an then
he realized that the airplane was actually heading towards the southwest
wall of the Pentagon; and he was standing only 150 feet from the
point of impact and for a brief moment he could see the body
of the plane sticking out from the side of the building, followed by
an explosion; and the blast of the impact was so tremendous, that from
his vantage point, it threw him backward over 100 feet slamming into
a light pole causing him internal injuries; and despite his internal
injuries, Master Sergeant Noel Sepulveda remained on his duty station
at the Pentagon for seven days after this attack while manning a triage
station to assist the other victims of the attackhttp://www.lulac.org/Issues/Resolve/2002/30%20Sepulveda.html

Shaeffer
Kevin

Lieutenant
Kevin Shaeffer, U.S. Navy (Retired) : At exactly 0943, the entire command
center exploded in a gigantic orange fireball, and I felt myself
being slammed to the deck by a massive and thunderous shock wave.
It felt to me as if the blast started at the outer wall, blowing me
forward toward Commander Dunn's desk. I never lost consciousness, and
though the entire space was pitch black, I sensed I was on fire.
While still lying on the deck, I ran my fingers through my hair and
over my face to extinguish flames. Simultaneously, I tried to roll my
body in order to smother the fire I felt burning my back and arms. As
I stood to get my wits about me, I could make out just barely, through
thick, acrid smoke, the carnage of what had been just moments before
a space full of my shipmates. I could not see much, but I could tell
the ceiling had collapsed and everything around me was blown to bits.
I felt as if I was crawling over rubble several feet high. Soon I came
upon frayed electrical cables dangling from the caved-in ceiling, in
front of broken pipes gushing water.http://www.usna79.com/News/Features/Proceedings_Toti_article.htm

Shaeffer
Kevin

Kevin
Shaeffer was sprawled by the shock wave, then watched from the
floor as a roiling, bright orange ball of fire shot toward him
and everything -- cubicles, desks, ceiling tiles, the building's concrete
support columns -- everything blew to pieces. Flames bathed his skin,
his eyes, his lungs. The room went dark. Shaeffer, dazed, prone on the
carpet, realized his back and head were on fire. He rolled to put himself
out, then staggered to his feet. He ran a hand through his hair. His
scalp felt wet. http://www.pilotonline.com/special/911/pentagon2.html

Wayne
Sinclair heard it before he felt it. He outfitted computers for the
Army on the first floor of the D Ring. As usual that morning, Sinclair,
54, caught the subway so he could be at work by 6, always the first
of the seven employees to arrive in Room 1D520. (...) they heard a thunderous
roar. Everything turned black. Smoke and fire engulfed the room. Walls
crumbled. Desks, file cabinets, and computers hurtled through the air.
"You couldn't see anything," he says. Some people were thrown to the
floor. Sinclair could feel his face, ears, and arms burning. But he
couldn't see them because the smoke was so thick. People screamed for
help. Chaos reigned. http://www.hjpa.org/morenews.html

Sinclair
William

Sinclair,
54, was sitting at his desk on the first floor of the Pentagon that
morning when he felt a giant "gush of air, then everything went
dark."http://www.washingtonpost.com...

Singleton
Jack

"Where
the plane came in was really at the construction entrance," says Jack
Singleton, president of Singleton Electric Co. Inc., Gaithersburg MD,
the Wedge One electrical subcontractor. "The plane's left wing actually
came in near the ground and the right wing was tilted up in the air.
That right wing went directly over our trailer, so if that wing had
not tilted up, it would have hit the trailer. My foreman, Mickey
Bell, had just walked out of the trailer and was walking toward
the construction entrance."http://www.designbuildmag.com/oct2001/pentagon1001.asp

Skarlet

Skarlet,
webmaster of punkprincess.com : As I came up along the Pentagon I saw
helicopters. (…) it was headed straight for the building. It made no
sense. (…) A huge jet. Then it was gone. A massive hole in the
side of the Pentagon gushed smoke. The noise was beyond description.
The smell seemed to singe the inside of my nose. The earth seemed to
stop shaking for a second, but then sirens began and the ground seemed
to shake again - this time from the incoming barrage of firetrucks,
police cars. military vehicles. (…) I called my boss. I had no memory
of how to work my cellphone. I hit redial and his number came up. "Something
hit the Pentagon. It must have been a helicopter." I knew that wasn't
true, but I heard myself say it. I heard myself believe it, if only
for a minute. "Buildings don't eat planes. That plane, it just vanished.
There should have been parts on the ground. It should have rained parts
on my car. The airplane didn't crash. Where are the parts?" That's
the conversation I had with myself on the way to work. It made sense
this morning. I swear that it did. (….) I finally cleared my head enough
to drive and spent hours getting home. I spent an eternity in my car.
I couldn't roll up the windows, the car smelled like the Inferno. Concrete
dust coats the outside of the car, turning it a weird color. Eventually
I got back here, back to the place I should have stayed in the first
place. There seems to be no footage of the crash, only the site. The
gash in the building looks so small on TV. The massiveness of the
structure lost in the tight shots of the fire. There was a plane.
It didn't go over the building. It went into the building. I want them
to find it whole, wedged between floors or something. I know that
isn't going to happen, but right now I pretend. I want to see footage
of the crash. I want to make it make sense. I want to know why there's
this gap in my memory, this gap that makes it seem as though the plane
simply became invisible and banked up at the very last minute, but
I don't think that's going to happen. I don't want to see footage of
the crash. It seems so unhealthy to see the planes in NY crash over
and over. To see the building fall again and again. I saw it once, the
Pentagon is shambles. I don't know that I want to see the crash ever
again. Even the pictures of the blaze are too much right now as the
firefighters try to contain it. It's weird to watch it on TV while the
same smoke drifts by your windows.I've showered and showered. Ultimately,
I think I'm going to throw away my clothes. I don't think the smell
will ever come out. I've reached my parents. My brother is already on
a Classified assignment. Who the hell knows where he is. I'm assuming
he's safe. I have no idea. Posted by skarlet at September 11, 2001
08:41 PMhttp://punkprincess.com/archives/002150.html

Slater
Mike

Mike
Slater, a former Marine : Then the Pentagon, built to withstand terrorist
attacks, shook like a rickety roller coaster. A section of it collapsed
and burned. "It sounded like a roar," said Mr. Slater, who was 500
yards away from where the jet slammed into the Pentagon's west side.
"I knew it was a bomb or something." Within the last year,
the Pentagon had put up shatter-reducing Mylar sheeting to reduce
the impact of a potential terrorist bomb. (…)As soon as Mr. Slater
stepped outside, he saw and smelled something uncomfortably familiar.
"I saw a mass of oily smoke and thought of the oil fields of Kuwait,"
he said. "There were 3,000 Americans killed in Pearl Harbor, this
will be at least that many, if not more, and I hope Congress has the
guts to do something about it."http://www.americanmemorials.com/memorial/tribute.asp?idMemorial=1316&idContributor=7466

Slater
Mike

Mike
Slater, a former Marine, was inside the Pentagon, 500 yards from the
jet's impact. "It was like a bomb," he said. "I saw a mass of
oily smoke and thought of the oil fields of Kuwait."http://maninut.com/patriotic_sites/tribute.htm

Smith
Stephanie

At
the Pentagon, Marine Maj. Stephanie Smith helped one victim, who was
suffering from smoke inhalation and a leg injury.The injured "were covered
with smoke and their uniforms were covered with smoke," Smith said.
People were bloodied and soaked with water from the sprinkler system,
she said."You felt it more than you heard it," she said of the
blast.http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2001/09/11/pentagon-workers.htm

Snavel
Dewey

SGT
Dewey Snavely was driving along Arlington's Quaker Lane when the radio
blasted the morning's first harrowing reports, then warned that a third
plane was heading his way. Minutes later, jet engines rumbled overhead.
"The guy I was with looked up and said: 'What the hell is that plane
doing?' Then we heard an explosion and the truck rocked back and forth."
Snavely, a member of the Engr. Co. on transition leave, knew deep in
his gut that the Pentagon was under attack. http://www.army.mil/soldiers/oct2001/features/aftermath.html

Snyder
Robert

Over
in his office at 1D-525 on the first floor of D Ring, Robert Snyder,
an Army lieutenant colonel, had been surfing the Web to check on the
World Trade Center horror. He heard a crack and boom, and then, instantly,
he saw flame and felt engulfed. The lights went out and his digital
watch stopped. It read 00:00:00. He hit the floor, having been taught
in military training that staying low was the best way to avoid smoke.
The only light came from a series of small fires burning around the
room. http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A38407-2001Sep15

Snyder
Robert

People
kept their cool, people started working with each other to get out,"
said Lieutenant Colonel Robert Snyder, who was in the basement level
of the Pentagon building when one of the explosions hit.

St
Clair Stanley

Stanley
St Clair was stumbling along the road away from the vast building, covered
in dust. He had been working on renovations on the first floor of the
section which was struck by the plane. "It shook the whole building
and hurt our ears. Papers and furniture and debris just went flying
through the hallway and I thought it was a bomb or something. Then someone
started shouting get out, get out." http://www.guardian.co.uk/wtccrash/story/0,1300,550486,00.html

USAToday.com
Multimedia Editor, saw it all: an American Airlines jetliner fly left
to right across his field of vision as he commuted to work Tuesday morning.
It was highly unusual. The large plane was 20 feet off the ground and
a mere 50 to 75 yards from his windshield. Two seconds later and before
he could see if the landing gear was down or any of the horror- struck
faces inside, the plane slammed into the west wall of the Pentagon 100
yards away. My first thought was he's not going to make it across the
river to National Airport. But whoever was flying the plane made no
attempt to change direction. It was coming in at a high rate of speed,
but not at a steep angle--almost like a heat-seeking missile
was locked onto its target and staying dead on course... "I didn't feel
anything coming out of the Pentagon [in terms of debris]," he said.
"A couple of minutes later, police cars and fire trucks headed to the
scene." Ironically, the passage of emergency vehicles got traffic moving
again, which was now crunching over twisted metal Sucherman guessed
was the skin of the plane. http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,3959,9306,00.asp

I
heard a sonic boom and then the impact, the explosion. ... There
were light poles down. There was what appeared to be the outside covering
of the jet strewn about. ... Within about two minutes there were firetucks
on the scene. Within a minute another plane started veering up and to
the side. At that point it wasn't clear if that plane was trying to
manouver out of the air space or if that plane was coming round for
another hit. (Audio)
http://play.rbn.com/?url=usat/usat/g2demand/010911sucherman.ra&

Jim
Sutherland, a mortgage broker, was driving near the Pentagon at 9:40
a.m. when he saw a 737 airplane 50 feet over Interstate 395 heading
in a straight line into the side of the Pentagon. The fireball explosion
that followed rocked his car. Drivers began pulling over to the
side - some taking pictures - not quite believing what they were seeing.
http://www.abqtrib.com/archives/news01/091201_news_dcscene.shtml

Stephens
Levi

Levi
Stephens 23, courier Armed Forces Information Service - According to
one witness, "what looked like a 747" plowed into the south side
of the Pentagon, possibly skipping through a heliport before it hit
the building. Personnel working in the Navy Annex, over which the airliner
flew, said they heard the distinct whine of jet engines as the airliner
approached. "I was driving away from the Pentagon in the South Pentagon
lot when I hear this huge rumble, the ground started shaking … I saw
this [plane] come flying over the Navy Annex. It flew over the van and
I looked back and I saw this huge explosion, black smoke everywhere."http://www.pstripes.com/01/sep01/ed091201i.html

Tamillow
Michael

FBI
evidence teams combing the area of impact along the building's perimeter
found parts of the fuselage from the Boeing 757, said Michael Tamillow,
a battalion chief and search and rescue expert for the Fairfax County,
Virginia, Fire Department. No large pieces apparently survived.http://www.cnn.com/2001/US/09/12/pentagon.terrorism/

Terronez
Tony

Around
9:40 a.m. I reached the heliport area (beside the Pentagon). So I got
about 100 yards or so past the heliport and then all of the sudden I
heard this loud screeching sound that just came out of nowhere and it
intensified. This huge WHOOSH! And something made me look in my rearview
mirror and by the time I looked up I saw the side of the Pentagon explode.
I was stunned. It was just so surreal, like something out of a movie,
like Die Hard. The side of a building just exploded! As the fireball
got higher and higher, you saw this debris go up in the air. I am
watching this in my rearview mirror, and then I thought, Oh my God,
there is debris coming toward me! So my reaction was, I ducked
into my passenger seat and I heard the pitter-patter of pebbles and
concrete bouncing off my car. And the next thing you know, I heard
this big crash come from somewhere. It sounded like glass being shattered
and I thought maybe, at first, it was one of my windows so I popped
up to look but everything was fine. But when I looked to the car next
to me I realized that something went through (the drivers) rear windshield
and shattered it. There was a hole where you could see that something
went through it. I put the car in park - it is amazing how instinct
takes over because I will never know how it is I kept my foot on the
brake when I ducked at the same time. I should have rammed right into
the guy in front of me. I got out of the car and the guy in front of
me, he and I just looked at each other. It seemed like everybody who
was on the road got out of their cars and just looked in disbelief as
the fireball just kept getting bigger and bigger. My jaw was dropped,
his jaw was dropped, and then, at that point, something about trying
to make sure people were OK overtook me and I started going around to
the people in the other cars to see if they were all right.I and the
guy in front of me went to the car next to me and asked the driver if
he was all right and if he was OK to drive. He was in shock, you could
tell. He just kept looking straight ahead. He didn't even look back,
he was so fixated on looking north. He didn't want to look south at
the Pentagon. And it took a couple of times for me and the other guy
to say, Can you drive? Hello? Are you OK? Are you OK? And he said, Yeah,
I think I can drive. We asked him again, Can you drive? and that time
he was more sure and said, Yes, yes, I can drive. Then both I and the
guy in front of me looked at his rear windshield and saw what was about
a four-inch hole in it and the rest of the window was shattered as if
someone took a baseball bat to it. At that point I realized - you see
at that point I didn't know it was a plane, I thought it was a missile
strike - how dangerous things were. And I just started yelling,
We gotta get out of here, to the guy in front of me - and he agreed
- and we started yelling at people, Get back in your cars! We gotta
get the f--- out of here! And I just kept repeating, Get in your cars!
Let's go, let's go! Get the f--- out of here. Go! Go! Go! And people
must have listened because down the road you heard more people telling
everyone to get in their cars and go. Cars were going over the median
on Route 27 because there wasn't any traffic coming southbound toward
the Pentagon. People were hopping over it any way they could, on the
grass, anything. It was a little scary at that point.Pulling away
from the Pentagon there was tons of stuff on the ground, big pieces
of metal, concrete, everything. We got up to a certain point and
there was this huge piece of something - I mean it was big, it looked
like a piece of an engine or something - in the road. And there was
somebody, definitely a security guard or maybe a military person, with
his car in front of it making sure no one touched it. (…) I looked
back and I saw the fire, it was just huge and just incredible. I
still cannot believe it. At that point in time, I remembered I had
a camera in my trunk. I got off an off-ramp beside the Pentagon and
parked my car in the grass and started taking pictures. The whole time
I was taking pictures it was so detailed. I could this huge piece of
a wheel on fire through the black smoke, but I could not see into the
Pentagon itself. http://www.counseling.org/ctonline/news/amazing1001.htm

Theall
David

Carl
Mahnken and his colleague in the Army public relations office, David
Theall, had been in a first-floor studio only a few dozen feet from
where the plane hit. A computer monitor had blown back and hit Theall
in the head, but he was conscious and he led the way out for his
buddy. They were walking over electrical wires, ceiling panels. They
could see no more than five feet in any direction. After the initial
whoosh and blast, it had seemed eerily silent until they reached the
D Ring hallway, where they heard other people, crying, moaning, talking.
(…) Theall said to Mahnken, "Buddy, I ain't going to let you go. We
had survived this. This force that drove us through walls."http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A38407-2001Sep15

Thompson
Carla

"I
glanced up just at the point where the plane was going into the building,"
said Carla Thompson, who works in an Arlington, Va., office building
about 1,000 yards from the crash. "I saw an indentation in the building
and then it was just blown-up up--red, everything red," she said.
"Everybody was just starting to go crazy. I was petrified." http://bernie.house.gov/documents/articles/20010912170838.asp

Thompson
Phillip

There is no doubt in my mind that last week's attack
on America was an act of war. I fought in the Gulf War. I saw bombs
and missiles explode overhead. I saw people die. And when, on my way
to work Sept. 11, I saw an American Airlines jet come overhead and slam
into the Pentagon, it all came back. Hard. I was sitting in heavy traffic
in the I-395 HOV lanes about 9:45 a.m., directly across from the Navy
Annex. I could see the roof of the Pentagon and, in the distance, the
Washington Monument. I heard the scream of a jet engine and, turning
to look, saw my driver's side window filled with the fuselage of the
doomed airliner. It was flying only a couple of hundred feet off the
ground - I could see the passenger windows glide by. The plane looked
as if it were coming in for a landing - cruising at a shallow angle,
wings level, very steady. But, strangely, the landing gear was up
and the flaps weren't down. I knew what was about to happen, but
my brain couldn't quite process the information. Like the other commuters
on the road, I was stunned into disbelief. The fireball that erupted
upon impact blossomed skyward, and the blast hit us in a wave. I don't
remember hearing a sound. It was so eerily similar to another experience
during the Gulf War - a missile strike that killed a Marine in my unit
- that when I jumped out of my SUV, I felt like I'd jumped into my past
and was in combat once again. The feeling was the same, but the context
was all wrong. (...) What if 'dash two' was inbound to the Pentagon?
Then a gray C-130 flew overhead, setting off a new round of
panic. I tried to reassure people that the plane was not a
threat. All around me people began to panic, fleeing for their lives.
Afraid of being trapped, I drove through a gap in the median barrier
and drove across 395 to an exit ramp. http://www.militarycity.com/sept11/911_1068139.html

Thurman
John

Major
John Thurman reflects on the friends and colleagues he lost. He was
prepared for the dangers of war, he says. But this was so unexpected.
(…) Thurman also was blown backward. (…) But it was a plane passing
beneath him, smashing through pilons and shaking the building's 60-year-old
structure. "I saw flames coming over the walls, and then retreat
back. And immediately the room was filled with smoke and the like,"
Thurman said. (…) Thurman was trying to orient himself in a darkened
room. His once familiar office was a jumble of toppled wall lockers
and upended furniture. Two officemates, a man and a woman, were alive.
The three crawled face down through the wreckage, looking for a way
out but finding only fire and blind alleys. One officemate passed out,
then the other. An overpowering desire to sleep overcame Thurman. "Suddenly
it hit me that I was going to die." "I thought,'Oh my god, my parents
are going to have their first grandchild and same day they are going
to lose their first son, their first child," he said. "And I got really
mad." The burst of adrenalin gave Thurman just enough strength to push
his way to safety before his soot-coated lungs gave out.
http://www.theosuobserver.com/main.cfm/include/smdetail/synid/54846.html

Ticknor
Henry

Henry
Ticknor, intern minister at the Unitarian Universalist Church of Arlington,
Virginia, was driving to church that Tuesday morning when American Airlines
Flight 77 came in fast and low over his car and struck the Pentagon.
"There was a puff of white smoke and then a huge billowing black
cloud," he said.http://www.uua.org/world/2002/01/feature3a.html

Timmerman
Tim

A
pilot who saw the impact, Tim Timmerman, said it had been an American
Airways 757. "It added power on its way in," he said. "The
nose hit, and the wings came forward and it went up in a fireball."
Smoke and flames poured out of a large hole punched into the side
of the Pentagon. Emergency crews rushed fire engines to the scene
and ambulancemen ran towards the flames holding wooden pallets to carry
bodies out. A few of the lightly injured, bleeding and covered in dust,
were recovering on the lawn outside, some in civilian clothes, some
in uniform. A piece of twisted aircraft fuselage lay nearby. No one
knew how many people had been killed, but rescue workers were finding
it nearly impossible to get to people trapped inside, beaten back by
the flames and falling debris. http://www.guardian.co.uk/wtccrash/story/0,1300,550486,00.html

Timmerman
Tim

Tim
Timmerman : Pilot. I was looking out the window; I live on the 16th
floor, overlooking the Pentagon, in a corner apartment, so I have quite
a panorama. And being next to National Airport, I hear jets all the
time, but this jet engine was way too loud. I looked out to the southwest,
and it came right down 395, right over Colombia Pike, and as is went
by the Sheraton Hotel, the pilot added power to the engines.
I heard it pull up a little bit more, and then I lost it behind a building.
And then it came out, and I saw it hit right in front of -- it didn't
appear to crash into the building; most of the energy was dissipated
in hitting the ground, but I saw the nose break up, I saw the wings
fly forward, and then the conflagration engulfed everything in flames.
It was horrible. It was a Boeing 757, American Airlines, no question.
It was so close to me it was like looking out my window and looking
at a helicopter. It was just right there. (We were told that it was
flying so low that it clipped off a couple of light poles as it was
coming in) That might have happened behind the apartments that occluded
my view. And when it reappeared, it was right before impact, and like
I said, it was right before impact, and I saw the airplane just disintegrate
and blow up into a huge ball of flames. And the building shook,
and it was quite a tremendous explosion. I noticed the fire trucks
and the responses was just wonderful. Fire trucks were there quickly.
I saw the area; the building didn't look very damaged initially, but
I do see now, looking out my window, there's quite a chunk in it. But
I think the blessing here might have been that the airplane hit before
it hit the building, it hit the ground, and a lot of energy might have
gone that way. That's what it appeared like.http://www.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0109/11/bn.32.html

Timmerman
Donald "Tim"

Donald
"Tim" Timmerman, watched from across Interstate 395: I was looking out
the window; I live on the 16th floor, overlooking the Pentagon, in a
corner apartment, so I have quite a panorama. And being next to National
Airport, I hear jets all the time, but this jet engine was way too loud.
I looked out to the southwest, and it came right down 395, right over
Colombia Pike, and as it went by the Sheraton Hotel, the pilot added
power to the engines. I heard it pull up a little bit more, and then
I lost it behind a building. And then it came out, and I saw it hit
right in front of -- it didn't appear to crash into the building;
most of the energy was dissipated in hitting the ground, but I saw the
nose break up, I saw the wings fly forward, and then the conflagration
engulfed everything in flames. It was horrible. What can you tell
us about the plane itself? It was a Boeing 757, American Airlines,
no question.You say that it was a Boeing, and you say it was a 757
or 767? 7-5-7.757, which, of course..American Airlines.American Airlines,
one of the new generation of jets. Right. It was so close to me it was
like looking out my window and looking at a helicopter. It was just
right there. . .cnn.com TRANSCRIPT http://commemoratewtc.com/transcripts/tr-13-46.php

Turner
Ron

Ron
Turner, the Navy's deputy chief information officer, was standing solemnly
at a funeral at Arlington National Cemetery when American Airlines Flight
77 crashed into the Pentagon Tuesday morning. He had only to turn to
watch the disaster unfold. "There was a huge fireball," he said,
"followed by the [usual] black cloud of a fuel burn." Turner, a
helicopter pilot during the Vietnam War, said the explosion was just
the same as explosions of jet fighters and helicopters during his tour
of duty in 1971. "It reminded me of being back in Vietnam," he said,
"watching Tan Son Nhut Air Base burn." http://www.govexec.com/dailyfed/0901/091301j3.htm

Velasquez
Jose

''It wasn't like a rumble, it was just - boom,'' said
Tom Van Leunen of the Navy Public Affairs Office. ''It was shocking.
... It immediately put you on your heels, in fact in my case, actually,
it kind of knocked me down.'' http://www.boston.com...

Velasquez
Jose

Jose
Velasquez : "It was like an earthquake" , "By the time I got outside
all I could see was a giant cloud of smoke, first white then black,
coming from the Pentagon," he said.Velasquez says the gas station's
security cameras are close enough to the Pentagon to have recorded the
moment of impact. "I've never seen what the pictures looked like," he
said. "The FBI was here within minutes and took the film." http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2001/12/1211_wirepentagon.html

Wallace
Alan

Alan
Wallace usually worked out of the Fort Myer fire station, but on Sept.
11 he was one of three firefighters assigned to the Pentagon's heliport.
Along with crew members Mark Skipper and Dennis Young, Wallace arrived
around 7:30 in the morning. After a quick breakfast, the 55-year-old
firefighter moved the station's firetruck out of the firehouse. President
Bush had used the heliport the day before: he'd motorcaded to the Pentagon,
then flown to Andrews Air Force Base for a trip to Florida. Bush was
scheduled to return to the Pentagon helipad later on Tuesday, Wallace
says. So Wallace wanted the firetruck out of the station before Secret
Service vehicles arrived and blocked its way. He parked it perpendicular
to the west wall of the Pentagon. Wallace and Skipper were walking along
the right side of the truck (Young was in the station) when the two
looked up and saw an airplane. It was about 25 feet off the ground and
just 200 yards away-the length of two football fields. They had heard
about the WTC disaster and had little doubt what was coming next. "Let's
go," Wallace yelled. Both men ran. Wallace ran back toward the west
side of the station, toward a nine-passenger Ford van. "My plans were
to run until I caught on fire," he says. He didn't know how long he'd
have or whether he could outrun the oncoming plane. Skipper ran north
into an open field. Wallace hadn't gotten far when the plane hit. "I
hadn't even reached the back of the van when I felt the fireball. I
felt the blast," he says. He hit the blacktop near the left rear tire
of the van and quickly shimmied underneath. "I remember feeling pressure,
a lot of heat," he says. He crawled toward the front of the van,
then emerged to see Skipper out in the field, still standing. "Everything
is on fire. The grass is on fire. The building is on fire. The firehouse
is on fire," Wallace recalls. "There was fire everywhere. Areas
of the blacktop were on fire." Wallace ran over to Skipper, who said
he was OK, too. They compared injuries-burned arms, minor cuts, scraped
skin. He ran back into the station to try to suit up. But he found debris
everywhere. The ceiling had crumbled, there were broken lights and drywall
everywhere. His boots were on fire. His fire pants filled with
debris. The fire alarm was blaring.Then Wallace heard someone call from
outside. "We need help over here," someone yelled. He ran back outside
over to the Pentagon building and helped lower people out of a first-floor
window, still some six feet off the ground. He helped 10 to 15 people
to safety. Most could walk, though he helped carry one badly burned
man. "He wasn't too responsive," Wallace recalls. He helped two other
men drag him to the other side of the heliport then he turned around.
"I've got to go back," he said. Working with a civilian, Wallace headed
back to the building. He could hear more cries for help from inside.
There was trash and debris everywhere. The trees were on fire.
Wallace headed into the building through an open door, but couldn't
find anyone else to save. "After a while I didn't hear anybody calling
anymore," he says. "They probably found another way out."http://www.msnbc.com/news/635293.asp

Wallace
Alan

About
9:40, Alan Wallace had finished fixing the foam metering valve on the
back of his fire truck parked in the Pentagon fire station and walked
to the front of the station. He looked up and saw a jetliner coming
straight at him. It was about 25 feet off the ground, no landing wheels
visible, a few hundred yards away and closing fast. "Runnnnn!" he yelled
to a pal. There was no time to look back, barely time to scramble. He
made it about 30 feet, heard a terrible roar, felt the heat, and dove
underneath a van, skinning his stomach as he slid along the blacktop,
sailing under it as though he were riding a luge. The van protected
him against burning metal that was flying around. A few seconds later
he was sliding back out to check on his friend and then race back to
the firetruck. He jumped in, threw it into gear, but the accelerator
was dead. The entire back of the truck was destroyed, the cab on fire.
He grabbed the radio headset and called the main station at Fort Myer
to report the unimaginable. The sun was still low in the sky, obscured
by the Pentagon and the enormous billowing clouds of acrid smoke, making
it hauntingly dark. The ground was on fire. Trees were on fire. Hot
slices of aluminum were everywhere. Wallace could hear voices crying
for help and moved toward them. People were coming out a window head
first, landing on him. He had faced incoming fire before -- he was with
the hospital corps in Vietnam when mortars and rocket shells dropped
on the operating room near Da Nang -- but he had never witnessed
anything of this devastating intensity.http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A38407-2001Sep15

Wallace
Alan

The
morning of Sept. 11 was crystal clear in Washington, still summer warm.
It would be easy to relax on a morning like that, but outside the Pentagon,
firefighter Alan Wallace and the safety crew at the Pentagon's heliport
pad already were too busy. President Bush was scheduled to fly from
Florida that afternoon, and his helicopter, Marine One, would carry
him to the Pentagon. Secret Service was everywhere and their
cars blocked the driveway. So the meticulous Wallace moved the fire
truck out of the way, parking it about 15 feet from the Pentagon. That's
when Wallace got a call from his chief at nearby Fort Myer telling him
of the attacks in New York and to be on alert. Minutes later, Wallace
and his buddy Mark Skipper looked up and saw the gleam of a silver jetliner.
But it was flying too low. Maybe less than 25 feet off the ground. And
it was heading right at them. "I yelled to Mark, 'Let's go!' " He bolted
to the right, and a second later felt the searing heat of the blast
behind him. He hit the ground and rolled under a parked van as a fire
engulfed his fire truck, then blew through the firehouse. Wallace got
back to his feet, saw Skipper had escaped, then rushed to the scorched
fire truck to see if it would run, but the truck only belched fire.
It wouldn't move. So Wallace switched on the truck's radio. "Foam 61
to Fort Myer," he said. "We have had a commercial carrier crash into
the west side of the Pentagon at the heliport, Washington Boulevard
side. The crew is OK. The airplane was a 757 Boeing or a 320 Airbus."
Although he was still frantic and shaken, Wallace's report turned out
to be painfully accurate. (…) With bits of cloth and fiberglass still
raining down outside the blackened section of the Pentagon, Alan Wallace's
instincts focused on trying to help somehow. The truck was useless.
So he dashed for his gear inside the torched firehouse. His boots were
filled with debris. His suspenders were on fire. Wallace and two other
firefighters rushed to a window, where Pentagon employees were crammed
together, frantic to escape the darkness. Fire burst through the
windows above them. The ground burned near Wallace with heat so hot
he thought several times that his pants were on fire. They began
grabbing arms and pulling people out - 15 in all. " They were all burned,"
Wallace said. But there wasn't time for Wallace and the other firefighters
to get emotional. "We just seemed to stay in one mode there until we
ran out of people coming out," Wallace said. And no one was sure how
many more remained inside.www.gosanangelo.com...

Wallace Terry

Terry C. Wallace - Southern Arizona Seismic Observatory - I looked pretty hard -- and to be honest I can't
find any CONCLUSIVELY above the noise. I calculated an expected magnitude assuming that the impact was
on the wall, not vertical (like UA flight), and got a magnitude of .8 The noise at all the stations
(closest is 60 km aways) is above this.
http://www.unknownnews.net/cdd060702.html

Walter
Mike

Washington,
Mike Walter, USA Today, on the road when a jet slammed into the Pentagon:
"I was sitting in the northbound on 27 and the traffic was, you know,
typical rush-hour -- it had ground to a standstill. I looked out my
window and I saw this plane, this jet, an American Airlines jet, coming.
And I thought, 'This doesn't add up, it's really low.' "And I saw it.
I mean it was like a cruise missile with wings. It went right
there and slammed right into the Pentagon. "Huge explosion, great
ball of fire, smoke started billowing out. And then it was chaos
on the highway as people tried to either move around the traffic and
go down, either forward or backward. "We had a lady in front of me,
who was backing up and screaming, 'Everybody go back, go back, they've
hit the Pentagon.' "It was just sheer terror."http://www.cnn.com/2001/CAREER/trends/09/11/witnesses/http://www.cnn.com/2001/US/09/11/pentagon.terrorism/

Wheelhouse Keith

Her brother, [Keith Wheelhouse], of Virginia Beach,
spotted the planes first. The second plane looked similar to a
C- 130 transport plane, he said. He believes it flew
directly above the American Airlines jet, as if to prevent two planes
from appearing on radar while at the same time guiding the jet toward
the Pentagon.http://indymedia.org/front.php3?article_id=131871

Don
Wright from the 12th floor, 1600 Wilson Boulevard, in Rosslyn: " ..
I watched this ...it looked like a commuter plane, two engined
... come down from the south real low ... " (Real Audio)
http://www.sun-sentinel.com...

Wyatt
Ian

Ian Wyatt
glanced into the sky just as a commercial airplane roared by about
100 yards off the ground. "I was so scared I thought it was coming
after me and just ducked for cover," said Wyatt, a 1999 graduate of
Mary Washington College who was walking to his federal job when terrorists
struck at the heart of the nation's defense yesterday morning. "It
was going so fast and it was so low," he said, standing on Army-Navy
Drive. "The only intelligent thought that came into my head was, 'Oh
my God, they hit the Pentagon.' I could then hear cars squealing all
around and people were just stunned." After the plane struck
the west side of the famed five-sided building, thick black smoke
billowed from a huge crater as fire raged within. http://www.fredericksburg.com/News/FLS/2001/092001/09122001/390193/printer_friendly

Yates
John

Security
officer John Yates was picked up and hurled 30 feet. Sgt. Maj. Tony
Rose, punched into a ceiling column, watched as the glass in the C Ring
windows spidered into tiny cubes. The sound erupted a heartbeat later,
a monstrous boom and crunch like a thousand file cabinets toppling at
once. To demographer Betty Maxfield, the room seemed to freeze, intact,
for a moment, then in slow motion the computers clicked off and the
lights failed and a fireball rolled through the cubicle farm like a
wave, with bulbous head and tapered tail, and as it passed, everything
around it burst into flames. Cabinets overturned, partitions exploded,
ceiling tiles burned and danced and fell with their metal frames. The
air boiled. (...) John Yates came to his senses to find that his death
was at hand. He could not breathe. He could not see. The room was ablaze
around him. The metal furniture jumbled all about was hot enough to
raise blisters. He heard screams. He wasn't sure that some weren't his.
His glasses remained on his face. They were smeared with something --
unburned jet fuel, which Yates mistook for blood. He carefully took
them off, folded them, and slipped them into his shirt pocket, then
stumbled toward the big room's interior. http://www.pilotonline.com/special/911/pentagon2.html

Yates
John

John
Yates worked in 2E471, a warren of cubicles. At 50, he was an Army security
manager who handed out keys and employee badges. (...) He had been sitting
on a table watching TV. When he stood up, the Pentagon shuddered. A
big ball of fire knocked him to the floor. Black smoke flooded the room.
Searing heat scorched him. Upended file cabinets blocked him. http://www.hjpa.org/morenews.html

Yeingst
William

Just
prior to the impact there were three firemen on the helipad at the
Pentagon. The president was supposed to land at the helipad two hours
after the impact, and so they had just pulled the foam truck out of
the firehouse and were standing there when they looked up and saw
the plane coming over the Navy Annex building. They turned and
ran, and at the point of impact were partially shielded by their fire
truck from the flying debris of shrapnel and flames. They were knocked
to the ground by the concussion, were able to get up, go over to the
fire truck, and initially they were able to get it started to call
for help at Fort Myer. And then they had to put out parts of their
uniform--their bunker gear was actually on fire, so the first thing
they had to do was put out their own fire truck and their fire equipment
and they tried to start the truck and move it, but they discovered
that it wouldn't move. They got out and looked, and the whole back
of the fire truck had melted.
Audio : http://americanhistory.si.edu/september11/collection/audio.asp?ID=6
Transcript : http://americanhistory.si.edu/september11/collection/transcript.asp?ID=6

Yonkers
Terry

``The
whole building shook'' with the impact, said Terry Yonkers, an Air Force
civilian employee at work inside the Pentagon at the time of the attack.
``There was screaming and pandemonium,'' he said, but the evacuation
ordered shortly afterward was carried out smoothly.http://www.firehouse.com/terrorist/11_APdc.html

Zakhem
Madelyn

Madelyn Zakhem, executive secretary at the STC (VDOT
Smart Traffic Center), had just stepped outside for a break and was
seated on a bench when she heard what she thought was a jet fighter
directly overhead. It wasn't. It was an airliner coming straight up
Columbia Pike at tree-top level. "It was huge! It was silver. It was
low -- unbelievable! I could see the cockpit. I fell to theground....
I was crying and scared". "If I had been on top of our building,
I would have been close enough to reach up and catch it," http://www.roadstothefuture.com/VA_Sept21.txt

The
large aircraft struck the outermost corridor (E-ring) of the five-ring
building at ground level (the second floor) at 9:43 a.m. EDT and continued
smashing its way through the D and C rings. Navy survivors on the B-ring
looked out their interior windows and saw flames and falling debris.(…)
Blast damage was also limited by new Kevlar panels, but they didn't
protect those nearby from fires from exploding fuel tanks, estimated
to have produced the equivalent of 200-400 tons of TNT. Fuel triggered
an intense fire that caused the roof of the damaged E-ring section to
give way at 10:10 a.m. It was still burning 18 hr. later. (…)
Navy officers not in the aircraft's direct path reported heavy safes
being flung across rooms and people thrown from their chairs.http://www.aviationnow.com/content/publication/awst/20010917/aw48.htm

Cbsnews

Radar
shows Flight 77 did a downward spiral, turning almost a complete circle
and dropping the last 7,000 feet in two-and-a-half minutes. The steep
turn was so smooth, the sources say, it's clear there was no fight for
control going on. And the complex maneuver suggests the hijackers had
better flying skills than many investigators first believed. The
jetliner disappeared from radar at 9:37 and less than a minute later
it clipped the tops of street lights and plowed into the Pentagon
at 460 mph.http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2001/09/11/national/main310721.shtml

CNN

PLANT
(LIVE): Well, and speaking to people here at the Pentagon, as they're
being evacuated from the building. I'm told by several people that there
was, in fact, an explosion. I was told by one witness, an Air Force
enlisted - senior enlisted man, that he was outside when it occurred.
He said that he saw a helicopter circle the building. He said it appeared
to be a U.S. military helicopter, and that it disappeared behind the
building where the helicopter landing zone is - excuse me - and he then
saw fireball go into the sky.[...]It's a very tense situation obviously,
but initial reports from witnesses indicate that there was in fact a
helicopter circling the building, contrary to what the AP reported,
according to the witnessess I've spoken to anyway, and that this helicopter
disappeared behind the building, and that there was then an explosion.
That's about all I have from here.
September 11 Live CNN Transcript, Europe

An
explosion at the Pentagon. A car-bomb explosion outside the State Department.
A loud explosion reported in the vicinity of the Capitol. There were
also reports of a fire on the National Mall, a stretch of open,
green space between the Capitol and the Washington Monument. That report
was not immediately confirmed. At the White House, employees ran out
of the executive mansion as police cleared it. Aides said a "credible
threat" against the White House had come in. At first, the evacuation
was orderly but, under orders from the Secret Service, employees
were soon ordered to run out of the gates. At the State Department,
a senior government official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said
the incident at State appeared connected with the events in New York
and at the Pentagon."Something has happened at the State Department,"
the source said. "We don't know what yet." http://www.geocities.com/fantasysplace2/pentagon.html

Federation
of American Scientists

Another
aspect of overpressure occurring in air bursts is the phenomenon of
Mach reflections, called the "Mach Effect." When a bomb is detonated
at some distance above the ground, the reflected wave catches
up to and combines with the original shock wave, called the incident
wave, to form a third wave that has a nearly vertical front at ground
level. This third wave is called a "Mach Wave" or "Mach Stem,"
and the point at which the three waves intersect is called the "Triple
Point." The Mach Stem grows in height as it spreads laterally,
and as the Mach Stem grows, the triple point rises, describing a curve
through the air. In the Mach Stem the incident wave is reinforced by
the reflected wave, and both the peak pressure and impulse are at a
maximum that is considerably higher than the peak pressure and impulse
of the original shock wave at the same distance from the point of explosion.
Using the phenomenon of Mach reflections, it is possible to increase
considerably the radius of effectiveness of a bomb. By detonating a
warhead at the proper height above the ground, the maximum radius at
which a given pressure or impulse is exerted can be increased, in some
cases by almost 50%, over that for the same bomb detonated at ground
level. The area of effectiveness, or damage volume, may thereby be increased
by as much as 100%.http://www.fas.org/man/dod-101/sys/land/docs/warheads.pdf

Firehouse

The
nerve center of the nation's military burst into flames and a portion
of one side of the five-sided structure collapsed when the plane struck
in midmorning. Secondary explosions were reported in the aftermath of
the attack and great billows of smoke drifted skyward toward the Potomac
River and the city beyond. http://www.firehouse.com/terrorist/11_APdc.html

Since the time of plane impact at the Pentagon had often been reported with large scatter, the
United States Army contacted us to inquire whether we could obtain an accurate time of the
Pentagon attack on September 11, 2001 based upon our seismic network. We analyzed seismic
records from five stations in the northeastern United States, ranging from 63 to 350 km from the
Pentagon. Despite detailed analysis of the data, we could not find a clear seismic signal. Even
the closest station (= 62.8 km) at Soldier’s Delight, Baltimore County, Maryland (SDMD) did
not record the impact. We concluded that the plane impact to the Pentagon generated relatively
weak seismic signals. However, we positively identified seismic signals associated with United
Airlines Flight 93 that crashed near Shanksville, Somerset County, Pennsylvania. The time of the
plane crash was 10:06:055 (EDT).http://www.mgs.md.gov/esic/publications/download/911pentagon.pdf

Navymedicine

Medical
practitioners should acquire additional skills to become knowledgeable
in all aspects of blast injuries. The range of injuries runs from
pneumothorax, visceral injuries, to the fracture of multiple sites (e.g.,
ribs, femur, ankle, wrist, and jaw), blast lung, facial burns, concussion,
and contusion. Practitioners also need to know all their medevac
assets and become knowledgeable and practiced in principles of mass
casualty and triage medicine. There are several final "takehome" points.
"Crises don't always come to someone else," said Marc Grossman, former
Director General, now Undersecretary for Political Affairs at the Department
of State. "It can't happen to me" is a myth. Embassies can be front
lines, as illustrated by the bombings in East Africa. The case study
of the Cole demonstrates the complexity of activities and multiple participants
in managing a large scale disaster. That is why such an event is called
a "complex emergency!" There are important lessons to be learned from
any disaster that should be shared. The bottom line is: Are you ready?navymedicine.med.navy.mil...

Ournetfamily

Anon, from the Naval Annex: We constantly scanned skyward with our
"eyeball radar," noting the sound of every jet engine seemed to make
us jump. Fortunately, the only aircraft noise was the crisp distinctive
ripping sound was of Air Force F-16's or the roar and popping of the
rotor blades of a Park Police UH-1 helicopter surveying the damage.
The only large fixed wing aircraft to appear was a gray C-130,
which appeared to be a Navy electronic warfare aircraft,
he seemed to survey the area and depart in on a westerly heading.http://www.ournetfamily.com/WarOnTerror/emails/pentagonwitness.html

Patriotresource

The
fire was so hot that firefighters could not approach the impact point
itself until approximately 1 P.M. The collapse and roof fires
left the inner courtyard visible from outside through a gaping hole.
The area hit by the plane was newly renovated and reinforced, while
the areas surrounding the impact zone were closed in preparation for
renovation, so the death toll could have been much higher if another
area had been hit.http://www.patriotresource.com/wtc/timeline/pentagon.html

Usatoday

In
the renovated section outside the immediate crash zone, most damage
was caused by smoke and water that poured out of brand-new sprinklers.
Many of these offices are occupied again.But there was extensive
fire damage hundreds of feet away in unrenovated areas that had not
yet had sprinklers installed. The fire was so intense it cracked
concrete.http://www.usatoday.com/news/sept11/2002/01/01/pentagon.htm

Washingtonpost

The
attack destroyed at least four of the five "rings" that spiral
around the massive office building, hitting in a recently renovated
section between corridors four and five.Fairfax County's Urban
Search and Rescue Team sent two ten-person squads into the Pentagon
to search for survivors and to assess the damage. About 70 members of
the team, staffed with paramedics, doctors, engineers and search dogs,
headed to the scene at 1 p.m. The specially trained unit, one of two
in the United States, has previously responded to bombings in Oklahoma
City and Nairobi, Kenya, and also to earthquakes in Turkey, Taiwan and
Armenia.Ten patients were brought to Inova Alexandria Hospital suffering
from injuries ranging from burns to head lacerations, according to Kathleen
Barry, chief nurse executive. By 1 p.m., two had been discharged, seven
were in stable condition and one was in critical condition suffering
from smoke inhalation. Earlier reports of other explosions in the Washington
region, at the State Department and the Capitol, were not accurate,
law enforcement officials said. The crash at the Pentagon, which occurred
less than an hour after the New York attacks, triggered immediate security
steps in the Washington area, including evacuation of the State Department,
the Capitol building and the West Wing of the White House. A 38-year-old
Marine major who asked to remain anonymous said he and dozens of his
colleagues rushed to the area in the Pentagon that appeared most
heavily damaged -- the B ring between the 4th and 5th corridors.
The major said that hundreds of people worked in the B-ring area and
that it was "decimated .‚.‚. that heat and fire, it could eat you
alive in three seconds."http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/metro/daily/sep01/attack.html

Washingtonpost

Another
Pentagon employee, a 37-year-old Marine major, said he was at a meeting
in the innermost A Ring when he heard a thud and felt the building shudder.
He and his colleagues rushed to help rescue people from an area that
appeared most heavily damaged, the B Ring between corridors 4 and
5. The search for survivors was hampered by intense heat and smoke.
As late as 10 p.m., rescue teams were having trouble getting close enough
to the worst damage. "We went down that first ring, but we only
got 100 feet," said Derek Spector, 37, an Arlington firefighter. "It
was an intense amount of heat." By afternoon, the investigation
was underway. At one point, a column of 50 FBI officers walked shoulder-to-shoulder
across the south grounds of the Pentagon, picking up debris and stuffing
it into brown bags. The lawn was scattered with chunks of the airplane,
some up to four feet across.http://www.washingtonpost.com...

Washingtonpost

ANYONE
WHO deliberately set out to invent a government program with the specific
aim of terrifying the Orwell-reading public could hardly have improved
on the Information Awareness Office. Tucked away in the outer reaches
of the Defense Department, brandishing an eerie and cryptic logo --
an all-seeing eye atop a pyramid and the slogan "Scientia Est Potentia"
("Knowledge Is Power") -- the office is headed by retired Rear Adm.
John M. Poindexter, the Reagan administration official who was convicted
in the wake of the Iran-contra scandal of five felony counts of lying
to Congress, destroying official documents and obstructing the congressional
inquiry into the affair. Not surprisingly, there have already been some
fast-breathing reactions to recently published information about the
office, including allegations that it is funded by the Homeland Security
Bill (it isn't) and that Adm. Poindexter has compiled a computer dossier
on every American (he hasn't, or not yet).
In fact, the program is still a research project of the Defense Advanced
Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the high-tech innovators who helped
create the Internet -- and who claim that this project is equally benign.
Among other things, the Information Awareness Office is trying to find
ways of better identifying potentially dangerous people by using video
cameras and biometrics, and of processing large amounts of data from
different sources so as to predict and prevent terrorist attacks (the
"Total Information Awareness System"). Police tracking the Washington
sniper suspects might, for example, have caught them more quickly with
the help of a computer program that could simultaneously search their
motel records, their immigration and police histories, and the traffic
violations tied to their Chevrolet Caprice.
Yet, given both the context and the content of the program, DARPA should
hardly have been surprised by the bad publicity. For however revolutionary
and innovative it may be, this is not neutral technology, and the potential
for abuse is enormous. If information that once took five people a week
to find will now take one person 15 minutes to find, then instant --
and instantly updatable -- computer dossiers on everyone really do cease
to be science fiction. If computers can learn to identify a person through
a video camera, then constant surveillance of society becomes possible,
too. Because the legal system designed to protect privacy has yet to
catch up with this technology, Congress needs to take a direct interest
in this project, and the defense secretary should appoint an outside
committee to oversee it before it proceeds. Privacy concerns need to
be built into the technology from the beginning -- if the public decides,
after being fully acquainted with the possibilities, that it is to be
built at all.
Finally, everyone involved might also want to consider whether Adm.
Poindexter is the best person to direct this extremely sensitive project.
Though his criminal convictions were overturned on appeal, his record
of lying to Congress hardly makes him an ideal protector of the legal
system, and his conduct of Iran-contra hardly makes him an advertisement
for government competence. Even his choice of logo calls into question
his tact and taste. Adm. Poindexter's presence on this project, the
lack of clear public information about it and the absence of any real
oversight already indicate a serious lapse of judgment. http://www.washingtonpost.com...